So, we have all of these blogs, what can we do with them?

In case you have not noticed we've added a few blogs to the website in the past month. Of course you are reading my blog so I guess you have noticed a little bit. I recently read an excellent book The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. This book opened my eyes to the possibilities of adding blogs to our church web site.

Blogs provide an incredible opportunity for our staff and other church members to communicate with folks who discover our website. They can come to our website and see posts about our missions trips, about our facility improvements, about new focuses on family ministry and even hear digital versions of the Sunday sermon.

Here are some thoughts on advantages that blogs have over our other methods of outreach:

• Blogs are not limited by the size of a printed page. We can post a little bit of text or a huge amount.
  
• Blogs do not require that someone receive a piece of paper from the church
• Blogs are discoverable via web search engines
• Blogs can carry digital content such as photos, video, audio
• Blogs can be updated as often as we want.
• Blogs are free. no paper, ink, advertising costs
  

The main advantage is that our blogs become another way for people to get to know Walnut Hills. I'd like for more church members to join our crew of bloggers. We currently have six bloggers updating 5 blogs. Want to join in? See me and we'll talk about it.

Now, what can YOU do with our blogs.

1. You can check them our via your web browser (just like now)
2. You can use a news feed reader to subscribe to the blogs. A news feed reader is a special piece of software that can automatically download the content of a blog to your PC whenever it changes. These tools save a lot of time when you are tracking a bunch of blog sites.
   
1. I use a piece of software called FeedReader. A list of readers can be found at http://blogspace.com/rss/readers The most popular reader is called FeedDemon (I'm trying it out)
   
2. There are also a huge number of web-based news readers such as Google Reader that you can use as well.
3. If you want to download the MP3 version of our sermons you can use iTunes from Apple to subscribe to our Sermon Podcast blog. You can subscribe to the podcast manually via ITunes. Soon you will be able to find us listed in the iTunes store. Don't worry the podcasts are free.

Later this week I will post some how-to notes on how to subscribe to our blogs and podcasts using a variety of tools.

For now, keep reading, and consider joining the conversation.