Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
This post is a result of some recent interactions I’ve had with two major Christian publishing companies: Zondervan and Thomas Nelson. There are three main things I’ve been impressed with, which I’ll expound on now.
First, I was surprised a few weeks ago to find Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson, on Twitter. I believe I’ve mentioned this in the past in passing, but I wanted to make a point of it here. Hyatt also frequently posts on his blog, From Where I Sit, which I often find informative and interesting. Thomas Nelson maintains a list of their employees who blog, found on their Company Bloggers page. This kind of interaction with the public really impresses me, and I hope to see more executives taking this route in the future.
Secondly, yesterday I was contacted by Megan, a web manager for Zondervan, in response to my recent post on the National Pastors Convention. She humbly and helpfully informed me of several options which I had overlooked in my original examination of the National Pastors Convention website. I was extremely surprised to receive a personal email (it certainly appeared as though it was not an automated message, as it included direct references to some of the things in my post) from someone from Zondervan, especially so soon after my post had been written. I responded to her email, and she even followed up to that response. I quickly added a note to the post mentioning this.
Lastly — and I’ve mentioned this before — I was lucky enough to be included in a group of reviewers for Scot McKnight‘s upcoming book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. Scot posted about this opportunity on his blog, as I discussed in the past, and I jumped on it. Zondervan’s purpose in doing this was to give 20 bloggers a chance to read and review the book. I was soon sent a copy of the book with the task of reviewing it and posting about it on my blog. I’ve had it for about 2 weeks now, and I expect to be done with it very soon.
This is by no means a summation of all that these or other publishing companies are doing on the Internet. I just wanted to discuss how I’ve been affected by their online efforts in the last few weeks. I’m excited about these types of online endeavors, and hopefully we’ll see much more of this in the future.
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
I just found the website for the upcoming National Pastors Convention held in San Diego, CA in February of 2009. On it is a list of all of the speakers that will be presenting during this couple of days. When I saw the list, I think I could have cried, as I would love to be able to attend something like this. Pretty much all of the pastors I admire and respect are going to be in the same place for a few days talking about the world-changing message of Jesus. I plan to whine about this for a long time, and maybe someone will take me. I definitely recommend checking this out.
HT: Skye Jethani
Edit: You don’t have to be a pastor to attend. They actually have lots of other options, including a student price and volunteer positions. A woman representing Zondervan cleared this up for me. I’ll be writing a future post discussing how impressed I’ve been with publishing companies.
Friday, September 26th, 2008
This video was passed along to me by a friend and I had to post it. Apparently, there is a leprechaun hanging out in the trees in Mobile, Alabama. Personally, I agree with the crack lady in the video. What do you think?
Leprechaun in Mobile, AL
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
This weekend the remnants of Hurricane Ike blew 80 mph winds through northern Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana leaving me powerless and Internetless on Sunday. In the meantime, my Verizon Dare connected me what was going on. I could access weather maps 2 ways, through the navigation system which was really simple, or through the internet. I am really amazed that as 1.26 million people were without power and/or internet, I had the world at my fingertips. The small screen played YouTube videos flawlessly, checked Duke energy’s website for updates, checked my email, and provided up to the minute radar maps. It’s a little annoying to browse a large site on a little screen, because everything is adjusted and you have to scroll down forever, and the touch screen limits how far down you can scroll. Other than that, it was awesome. I charged it up using a converter in my car and it charged it from dead to lasting three days so far in about 1 hour.
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
For a limited time, the normally $10 Earthscape iPhone app is free to download (iTunes link)! I’m in the process of downloading it now, and it looks like it should be really cool, despite its lack of some important features. I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot if you’re an iPhone owner.
From Techcrunch:
“The app, which we first wrote about in May, puts a little globe in your pocket that you can spin around and zoom in to specific locations. It shows where you are based on your GPS coordinates, highlights locations with Wikipedia entries (and lets you read those entries as well) and flickr photos. Users can also take their own photos and add them to the application’s database.”