After hearing about this, one of our students immediately went and broke the record for number of times saying “pretty” before “good” in one breath.  He was beaten soon after by a girl from Canada, but rest assured that he considered it a matter of national pride to get this  record back in American hands!

So, we hosted a world record event and set a bunch of great ones that are being verified as I type.  As a fun promo for the event our staff broke several records including my own world record:

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If you go to your feed and click most recent, most people assume that is everything posted by every one, but that is most likely not the case.  Click the disclosure triangle next to “Most recent” and the go down to “edit options.” Now look at the field next to “show posts from:”  Unless you have changed from the default you will notice that “Friends and pages you interact with most” is selected.

For a while, I had been noticing that I wasn’t seeing baby pictures from my extended family or my Church’s main group updates, but figured they were getting lost in the feed.  These were groups that, though I wanted to see the information, I didn’t interact with very much.  All you need to do is change the setting to “all your friends and pages.”  Then, just hide the people and pages you don’t want to see in your feed.

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Labor mate is a typical great iPhone app in that it does one thing incredibly well.  It times contractions.  Press a button when the contraction starts, press again when it stops, and Labor Mate puts together a nice list of the frequency and duration.  Think it’s about to get real?  Labor Mate will email the contraction log to your doctor for him or her to review.  It will even update twitter and Facebook if you are the type who loves to over share!

My advice for all people who are pregnant is to go straight to the app store and spend the $0.99 for this perfect little app (and ask your wife before tweeting contraction information).

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Then I stumbled upon Square.

Square is simple. From the little one inch by one inch plastic reader that plugs into the headphone jack on your phone (iOS or android) to the flat 2.75% fee per swipe to the super-straightforward, free app there is one word to describe it: simple.

Did I mention cheap? All you have to do to get the reader is give them basic accounting information and they mail it, at no charge, to your home or office a couple days later. How do they make money? Most places charge variable rate fee from 2.5%-5% per transaction and a $0.15 per transaction fee. Some level the percentage to three or three and a half, but square is cheap and simple. 2.75% per card swipe transaction.

The Square app is super easy to use. All you do is download the app, plug in the dongle, log in and you are ready to take a payment. To do that, you enter the amount and an optional description (we put the budget line item and the event) and swipe their card. They are then taken to a signature screen where they can sign with a finger or stylus if you have one. When they press the continue button, they are prompted to enter a cell number or email address where the app immediately sends a link to a receipt for the transaction. The money is then deposited (one lump sum deposit per day) into whichever account you provide.

You then have access to all that data (minus the full card number) in their clean, user friendly site which will allow you to download it in excel format with a ton of data attached to each transaction.

A couple of weeks ago I was stopped on Sunday morning on my way to the youth area by a member who said that he was sorry that he had not yet brought me his donation for a fundraiser.  He never has his checkbook at church.  I told him that I could take a credit card, and he was relieved.  I plugged in the square dongle, opened the app, swiped his card and it was done.  Brilliant.

Simple, cheap and brilliant, but not perfect. If you want to use this for multiple ministries, it may get difficult. You will have to sort through all the transactions to figure out which one went to which ministry. It would be nice if they could have sub-accounts to break things out easily.

Overall, I am telling everyone I meet to stop whatever they are doing, go to the Square website and start making life easier for them and their members.

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I recently discovered this interesting Google Labs project called Google Ngram Viewier that piggy backs on the data Google is collecting via Google books.  You probably already know that Google books is is not only adding new texts, but scanning (and OCRing) all the books currently available in print at massive libraries all over the world.  You can imagine the interesting types of things you could do with that massive data set.  When you combine all the world’s digitized books with a google algorhythm and their massive amounts of processing power, you get Ngram Viewer.

It is pretty basic right now.  You put in a list of terms separated by commas, and it gives you a line graph showing how popular those words were in print from 1500 on (or any subset of years).  Turning our attention towards our graph of Heaven and hell from 1800-2000, we can see that, with a few exceptions, heaven was firmly in the lead until it took a turn around 1930 from which point hell has been on the rise and not looking back.

I look forward to seeing the interesting sets of terms you come up with!

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That is to say that I would have told you no this time last year about the original iPad.  Apple’s M.O. is to initially release a revolutionary product that is a bit more simple than their final intention (think original iPhone with no app store, copy / paste, or 3G).  Which means that unless you are uber-wealthy or have some other justification, you always wait for the second version.

This is no exception.  We now have an iPad with a stout processor, front AND rear facing cameras, multi-tasking and a robust number of apps (60,000).  That means that you will have no problem justifying whether the hardware is going to be made totally obsolete in a year the way this has pretty much done with the original iPad.

Now that we’ve justified the hardware as a legit expense, we need to turn our attention to the apps.  This is what will make or break your proposal.  Here’s the question you need to ask: will these apps increase the effectiveness of your ministry and/or save you money?  There are several interesting things you can do with apps now.  You can video chat with a missionary you are supporting, you can control keynote and ProPresenter, you can record your praise band with garageband (8tracks), you can edit movies with imovie, you can have a virtual whiteboard run into the projector, and you can show HD movies off of netfllix or other streaming services through the new HDMI attachment.  On the saving money front, you can use this as an ebook reader which has saved me as much as $30 on a single book.

What do you think?  Justifiable?  Maybe.  The clincher may be using this to replace your laptop or desktop, but that is a bit trickier.  While this is incredibly powerful for a tablet, it is lacking in that department when compared to a notebook.  Though, if you don’t do a TON of serious video, graphics, or audio work, you might be able to make this work.  It will allow you to connect an external keyboard and mouse via bluetooth which makes it a bit more credible, but BE careful.  If you are looking into using this to replace a traditional form-factor computer, I would suggest borrowing one for a couple of days to see if it does everything you need.

So, go ahead and run the numbers, write a proposal, and let us know how you end up using this to connect with teens!

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Now that you’ve got your gear set and scheduled some recording time, you’re ready to go!  I am a mac guy, so I use the great multi-track recording software that comes bundled with every mac: GarageBand.  If you aren’t a mac fanboy, you can opt for a great free open source option:  Audacity.

The way it works with my setup is I open wiretap and select my inputs: Shure X2u to record my voice and Skype audio to record its audio.  It then creates a virtual audio card with four channels that can be selected in the audio preferences of GarageBand.  After doing that, I select which audio goes to which track and I’m ready to test the audio levels.  The one thing that I dislike about GarageBand is its audio meters.  They are small and not extremely accurate.  Instead of trusting them, I test record audio from both sources a couple of times until they are as loud as possible without distorting.

The reason for doing all this work to get the different audio sources on different tracks is simple.  Though I want to be able to get a podcast that is pretty much ready to chop into 10-minute pieces and publish, I want to be able to go back and fix problems like if the audio levels are too different, the guest wants to edit something out , or if a cell phone goes off in the guest’s office, etc.

A cheaper, but more time consuming, solution for this is to buy Call Recorder from Ecamm.  With this method, you record the skype call in one file and your audio in another.  After it’s all over you import the two files into the editor and move them around until they are synced (tip:  make a loud noise at the beginning that can be heard in both audio files… then you match those sounds together… much faster!)

I generally shoot for recording about 30-45 minutes of audio in each interview that I can then chop down into three episodes after it’s all over.  While doing the interview, I watch the clock and when we come to a stopping point at about ten minutes, I make a break and start over as if it was a new episode (which it will be).

After it’s recorded, I go through the effects to get a good sound on the voices, I generally use male narrator for both the Skype audio and my own.  I save the file, open another and get my next guest on the line.  Over and over again until they are all recorded and saved!

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I am sure I don’t need to give you ideas on using a podcst in your ministry, but just in case, here are a couple:

1. Daily/weekly devotion or thought for students
2. Daily/weekly Bible memory verse
3. Rebroadcast of your message
4. Youth volunteer training/tip
5. Parent update

This will be a series of posts.  Part one will focus on describing the gear and basic schedule, part two will look at the setup and actual recording, and part three the publishing.

The Schedule

I don’t have the kind of time every other week to devote to recording, editing, and publishing the podcast.  So in order to limit the weekly work, I schedule a couple of half days of recording every six months.  I schedule the interviewees a couple of weeks before the recording date and get a basic outline of their training piece via email.  Usually, I am able to get about 30 minutes of content in each one-hour session which is three podcasts.  By doing it this way I cut the weekly work down to about 10-30 minutes depending on how much editing is required.  If you end up doing it this way, I will give some tips for things you can do while recording that will make the editing easier months down the road.

The Gear

I say work with what you’ve got.  If you are starting, you may not need to buy anything, but I found a couple of purchases that streamline the process for me and bring the quality up a bit as well.

1. Shure X2u ($99 on Amazon) – I reviewed this in an earlier post.  This alows me to take any mic I have and turn it into a USB mic that can be recorded in my audio recording program.  Though your built-in mic will work, this will make you sound professional without spending a fortune.
2. Skype (Free) – This is what I use to get the audio from the interviewees.  I also pay for a Skypein number so that people who do not have Skype can use a regular phone to call me on Skype. The cost for that is about $18 a quarter.
3. Garage Band (Free with Mac) – I have access to high-end audio software like sountrack Pro, but have found that this is simple and quick to record and edit something as simple as a two person interview.  It also has built in EQ and Compressors for podcasting that makes the mic and Skype audio sound a lot better.  If you are on the Windows side of things, Audacity is a great free option.
4. Wiretap Anywhere ($129) – This is a bit of a splurge, but worth it if you can swing it.  Wiretap anywhere will take audio from any program or hardware device on your computer and convert it into a virtual sound card that allows you to record those pieces of audio on separate tracks.  I tried several methods to get this working when I was researching and found this to be WAY above everything else in reliability and usability.  This gets it all into Garage band live eliminating any later steps/synchronization.
5. Squarespace ($10+ per month) – This is a content management system/hosting solution that I use for our youth site.  It makes publishing the podcast content and feed as simple as posting to your blog.  Pricey if you are only using it for your podcast, but worth it if you are shopping around for web hosting/authoring.
6. Macbook ($999+)  Even the most basic macbook will do the job.  I will hold back my fanboyness here, but I think that for most youth ministers the ease, quality, and price of  creative tools (most need no more than those included with every mac) along with stability makes it a no-brainer.

My advice with this sort of gear is to go as cheap as possible at the beginning.  If the podcast does well, you can always add sound quality later.  As far as I am concerned, the audio quality cannot make up for poor content, but great content can go a long way towards overcoming less-than-professional audio quality.

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Lessig explains that the movie missed the whole point and magic of Zuckerberg’s story.  He says, “what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone.”  I agree.  As a person who spent his adolescence in a world where the internet was just beginning to take shape, I am constantly surprised by the total lack of limits (both good and bad) that the internet provides.

I have seen this first hand (tough not nearly as lucratively as Zuckerberg!).  I have a personal blog where I post thoughts on faith, ministry, and the future of the church.  It has regular visitors from 23 countries!   I’m just some punk youth pastor sitting on a chair at home drinking sweet tea!  I love writing it, but never thought I would have that type of audience when I started posting on it years ago.

What this means for our students is that they live in a world where they do not have to get corporate financing, a publishing contract, or a record deal to make a serious attempt at their dreams.

I think that is something that we MUST capitalize on as youth ministers.  I don’t mean having a blog or a Facebook page, but helping set youth free to do something about their faith.  Instead of encouraging them to engage in the 1950s passive learner model of sitting and listening every time we get them together, we need to be giving them the kind of permission with their faith that the internet gives them.  We need to be giving them permission to fulfill Jesus’ dream of “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”

I think the key to getting those students engaged is to follow the lessons from the internet:

1. Start small and close to free.  What can you and your friends do in your spare time to make a difference?
2. Make it social.  A cople of people working together have much more insight and potential than a lone ranger.
3. Release the beta.  Launch sooner than later.  If it is overwhelming, make it smaller.  If something non-essential is going to delay the launch, do it later.
4. Remind them that when Jesus gives the Great Commission in Matthew, he is both asking us to go, and giving us authority to go… just like the internet.
5. Allow comments.  Find ways to get other people to tell you how you are doing, and what you could do better.
6. Tap into a social network.  Students have a limited network on their own, but when they have adults on the team, they  have access to a much broader network of people and resources than they did on their own.

These are a few.  I know there are more.  Instead of resisting the internet’s no-limit posture, let’s funnel that power into the true hope for the hopeless.

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