No Longer a Whiny Two Year Old

Last Sunday the Christian Web Trends blog turned 3.  Whohoo!  In 3 years we’ve posted hundreds of articles to help Christians better use the Internet in their churches, schools, businesses and ministries.  Hopefully we’ve written a few things that have helped you personally.

Over the past year or so, I feel like CWT has become something of an island.  We’ve usually posted one original article a week having to do with the area of ministry or technology OCC was focused on for that month.  We haven’t done much to engage the world outside of OurChurch.Com.  And in general comments and interaction have declined.  Boooo.

So, starting today we are making some changes to breath new life into Christian Web Trends to make it more interesting, engaging, and cutting edge.  We also want to become a bigger part of the broader conversation about how to best use Internet technology in ministry.  So, here’s the plan…

1) More frequent, shorter posts.  Instead of one long post a week, expect several shorter posts on varying topics.  We might even post more than once in a day.  (Oooohhhh, only really cool blogs do that.)

(BTW, if you’re worried about getting inundated with blog notification emails, we will probably only email 1 or 2 blog posts a week.  If you want instant notification of all blog posts, subscribe to the RSS feed.  You should use an RSS feed reader anyway. 😉

2) Posts about current news.  When Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc do something noteworthy or when we hear about a Christian organization doing something innovative, we’ll write about it and kick off a discussion of how it affects you.

3) Engage the blogosphere.  We read a lot of other insightful blogs.  Some focus exclusively on ministry and technology like we do.  Others are more tangential like those that focus on evangelism, spiritual issues, communication, and search engine optimization but occasionally write stuff relevant to our conversation. Look for us to comment on their blogs and blog about their blogs.

4) Guest bloggers.  I don’t want to be the only conversation starter here.  So, I invite you to step up to the mic and talk.  What ministry/tech issues are on your mind?  What are you seeing?  Reading?

Note to future guest blogger – please keep in mind that the focus of this blog is ministry and technology.  We’ve had guest bloggers send us stuff on oddly unrelated topics from the rapture to research on teen sexual experimentation.  Go figure.

5) Clean up.  I’ll try to clean up the look of the blog a bit.  Cut down the long list of categories and archives?

6) Go deep.  Just because there’s something new and cool we can do online doesn’t mean we necessarily should.  Sometimes we’ve got to take a step back and ask ourselves the deeper spiritual questions.  Why are we doing this?  Does this really honor God and help people?

7) Lighten up.  While there’s time for deep, there’s also gotta be time to joke around. We’ve been way too serious lately.  How about if we discuss ministry/tech issues and have fun doing it?

8) Get funky.  Honestly, I have no idea what this means other than that we’re going to be creative and take some chances.  We’ll experiment with some social networking tools.  Maybe we’ll try an audio podcast, or I’ll let you watch live via web cam as I type up a blog article (wouldn’t that be amazingly boring?)  Maybe we’ll form a band and do a world tour.

So, what do you think of these changes?  What would you change?  What would you add or get rid of?

We really, really, really want to know what you think.