2009 Emmy Awards

There was a common theme in tonight’s Emmy awards, which is still being broadcast live as I write this. Numerous times thus far in the program they have mentioned the demise of broadcast television. The producers and writers are going all out to make sure you don't change the channel so they can get their message across. Oh, and so CBS can make a killing on the ratings.

So why the demise of broadcast TV? Simple, social networking and social media have started to undo the fabric of network TV. No longer do we wait for them to feed us programming on their schedule. We can now make our own anytime, anyplace. It has been said that with social media the news doesn't come to us, we make it. The same can be said for entertainment, we don't wait for it to come to us, we make it.

Try as they might the big networks are still having trouble making all this work. They promote that you can watch their shows online anytime (a big point of contention in last year's writer's strike, remember) and yet the core of their business model is the notion that we will all sit down at 9:00 on Thursday night to watch a show.  TiVo anyone?

So enjoy watching them squirm while you can. They know they are in trouble, they know folks are turning off their TV's in droves, hence all the sarcastic references and creative attempts to capture and keep our attention in tonight’s Emmy awards. Although I haven't seen a promo for any sort of official Twitter channel or hash tag - fascinating.

What can the church learn from Facebook?

Facebook passed an interesting milestone this week when they announced their 300 millionth user. That's right; there are now 300 million accounts on Facebook. According to the US Census there are 307 million Americans. Facebook is growing at a rate of 800,000 new users per day - you can do the math to see it won't be too long before Facebook is larger than the population of the United States.

Facebook also announced they are finally turning a profit - which will probably lead them to an IPO sometime in the next few years. Until they were making money there was concern that someone might buy them out to ease their financial problems but soon you and I could be shareholders in Facebook. What a concept, especially considering that 70% of Facebook users are from outside the US.

You can get more info from the link below but what is Facebook doing to draw people together that the church could learn from? What would happen if your church grew by 20% in 2 months? With as much time as church folks spend using Facebook I would hope they could learn from it on how to better reach out to those around them. Think of the Kingdom impact if your church grew by 20% in 2 months, or even 20% a year.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/16/facebook.profit/index.html

Adding to the team

We are looking to add a full time person to the technology team at Faith Ministries in Lafayette, IN.  For the job description and more details visit our webiste at http://www.faithlafayette.org/.

If you are interested or you know of someone please have them check out the website.  We run a lean IT department so it is important that in order to continue running lean that we find someone with a broad width of experience but also a great depth in knowledge.  While it would be nice to hire a separate DBA, help desk technician, system administrator, etc. it is more important that we maintain our fiscal stability while still reaching the world with the message of the gospel.  As a result our technology team has to be very well rounded so the load can be spread and the mission accomplished.