Social Media Lovin

We had a talk today at work about how we should use social media to promote work. So I decided today to have another week of blogging. This actually has nothing to do with work and doesn't promote it at all. But I was reminded that I have some social media to attend to. I'm terribly bad these days. I think it's partly because I've been spending a lot of time working in the office which doesn't give much food for blogging. I do still watch a lot of YouTube and my new friends, Vimeo. But I don't want to just post videos all the time. Anyway, I promise to blog every day this week.

I won't give you anything if I don't. You can give me grief.

Tomorrow I have nothing on my work agenda except a meeting about a database. I pretty sure it'll be awesome and I'll want to blog about it. I may even promote my workplace. "Let us minister to you, we're getting a database that's so awesome we'll know more about you than Facebook, Google and spam mailers put together!"

But just before I go, while I am blogging about blogging and videos and stuff, this video is pretty rockin'. Violent, but rockin'.

Hello Again

I'm aware that my blogging efforts of late have been rather poor. I have reasonable excuses. But my promise to you is this. I will blog every day between now and next Monday. If I don't, I will take you all out to dinner. A dinner of rice. And you may only get a few grains, but it'll be rice none the less.

Tonight I probably won't say anymore I have stuff to do.

But while we're waiting, on a question that came up at Bible study tonight, do you believe in the physical resurrection of Christ? Why or why not?

Work and Laziness Potificated

The talk I blogged about writing, is now up. You can go here to read about it or you can just listen to it here. Alternatively you can go search for Tom French in iTunes and subscribe to the podcast. Or you could do nothing at all. The options are yours people.

The Youth Ministry Blogger Elites

I've been reading a few youth ministry blogs lately, and I've noticed that I'm not enjoying most of them very much. I think it's because almost every post is full of advice: "10 Ways to Be an Awesome Youth Pastor", "4 Things Which You Don't Know About Youth Culture but I Do", "15 Mistakes that People less Good at Ministry than Me Make". I think I get sick of hearing from these "experts", because I know I do youth ministry and I can blog too but that doesn't make me an expert. I guess I just don't trust them, because they sound so sure of themselves and I don't even know if they have any idea what they're doing.

I think this might be a cultural thing though, because all these blogs are American and I've heard Americans love to give advice. Then again, I've heard Americans all carry guns and think Obama is a Muslim and the anti-Christ, and obviously that's not true, unless there are a whole bunch of people in the US who actually want the anti-Christ running their country and that's why they voted him in.

That said (the blog bit, not the Obama bit), they're not all bad. I've been enjoying nailscars.com. It's not very preachy and it's got some good thoughts on it.* I really like his 10 Confessions post because I identify with most of them. However I keep wondering why the blog would be named Nails Cars. Perhaps he's called Nail and selling cars is his tent making ministry (haw haw).

I recently found out that I'm probably going to be put in charge of doing a schools ministry blog at work. It'll be about giving advice to lunch time group leaders and school chaplains. I'm planning on using it to berate all the school chaplains and student leaders about why they're not as awesome as me, especially since I've never been a school chaplain, so I have never failed at it, which a zero failure rate makes me pretty qualified. I have failed at student leadership. I was a leader at my lunch time Christian group at high school, but I think I just turned up and at the Tim Tams.

What I am pleased about is that all my many years of blogging will now pay off in the professional world of para-church ministry. And it'll mean I can spend more time at work legitimately reading blogs and going on Facebook. Life is awesome.

Now I should angle to be in charge of jumping castles research at work too. I could spend my days travelling the state testing jumping castles. It's important gospel ministry.

Anyway, if you ever find that my blogging ever becomes too preachy because I think I'm too awesome, feel free to tell me I'm not all that. I'll ignore you, but you can appreciate you made the effort, and my past (current?) self will thank you, even if my future self resents you.


*I have to say that though because I just commented on the blog and I'm worried Mr Nailscars will come and read my blog and see me complaining about American blogs and he'll take it personally and hate me and I couldn't handle that.

Previously Unseen Specialness

I was just going through my old blog posts and making them more template friendly, and I found this post which I never posted. I wrote it during the time when we'd just lost our senior minister at my old church where I was the Youth Minister. So if you want to see a post that till now has been hidden, go click on the link. To save you the time though, it's just me musing on church law and the significance of paid staff so I can't imagine many of you would be that interested.

Publishing Deal

I just found a website that will turn my blog into a book. This is a narcissistic dream come true. I've always had secret hopes that people would come across my blog and say "Wow, that's amazing, that should be a book." And then some dedicated editor would go through all 3700 posts and pick the best ones, then make it into a freakin' epic. It'd be awesome. Well, now for a low, low price of $169.65 for the first volume (Dec 2002-Mar 2004) I can have my blog book, with no editing necessary. It's only 460 pages long. Woo!

To tell you the truth, I can't really be bothered making a book of my blog. But feel free to head over to the site and make your own book of my blog. Or in fact, you could just print it all out at home and get it bound at Kinkos. I promise, I'd sign it for you if you did. I mean, it'd be a dream come true.

Vox

I stuck up a new talk on the preaching podcast/blog. It's one I did at a school last month. I recorded it on my phone because I thought it might be good to post.

Things have been very quiet on the podcast this year. This isn't for lack of preaching, but lack of access to recordings. But between now and August I should have about seven new talks and sermons to post. So things should speed up a little.

Anyway, if you want to listen, you can go listen to the new one here.

Money Money Money

So I've just set up for Amazon Associates. I think it means that I can link to products that I talk about and then you all can click on them and buy them and I get 15% of something.

I got it mainly because I want pretty links. But I figured I might make the most of the pretty links and see if I can make a dime. I've never made a cent off this blog. In fact I'm pretty sure it's cost me at least $20 over the past 9 years or however long I've been blogging. It's hard to keep a slick operation like this going.

I've always refused to stick ads on my blog because they're ugly and I'm not a blog pimp. But I figure this is just letting you buy the stuff that I'm talking about. All I'm doing is encouraging consumerism, not making my blog look ugly. Anyway so let me see what this looks like by showing you a little of my life:

What I'm Reading:

So currently I'm working through a thousand books. But here are the more prominent ones:



Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Tim Keller this was going to be one of the most important books of our generation for New Testament scholarship. Or something like that. Or maybe he just said I should read it. I'm not sure.

Anyway, it's good. It's a nice look at some of the ideas about the historical Jesus that are out there from a more conservative standpoint.





Planting Missional Churches

This is meant to be the book to read on church planting. And it's pretty darn nice. If only he wrote an Australian edition, it's all very North American-centric.





Tomorrow When the War Began

I'm reading this again because the movie is coming out and I'm reliving my childhood. It's fun but the action is pretty dull compared to almost every other war book I've read.



So there you go. There's my chance to make some money. And now that I look at it, it's a rather ugly way to make money and I feel like a dirty blog pimp. So unless I find a way to make it more pretty, I probably won't do that again.

Update: Actually I've fiddled with it and it's not very intrusive at all any more. It's kinda like the sort of linkage I would do back in the old days when I didn't worship money. So maybe I'll let it stay. But except every blog post from now on to be about a product you can buy. Probably an expensive one.

New Comments

If you try and comment you'll notice there's a whole new format for comments. It lets you add photos, link to your Google account or whatever, embed YouTube and all sorts of other stuff. It's a whole new era for interactivity that seems a bit overly engineered to me. It's Facebook/Twitterising my comments. I would have rather kept them old and boring, but Haloscan forced me to upgrade or get lost. So as you can see, I upgraded.

Still I do think it looks a little nicer.

Google Reader

Over the past few days I've decided to make more use of my Google Reader. I have started to follow people and the blog posts they share, and I've started sharing blog posts that I like.

I think I like it because I read peoples blogs and think "Gosh, I wish I blogged that." Now with Google Reader I kinda can. Google tells me I have 5 people following my shared, but I wouldn't be surprised if I actually have none.

I'm slowly putting in you folk from Blog Feed so I can share your posts if I like them with all five of my avid followers.

Feel free to follow me if you want. I'm here or you can just search for thomaswench. That'll work too.

Now wasn't that exciting?

Milestone

If you look to the left you'll notice that this is post 250 of 2009. That's 9 more posts than were done in the whole of 2008. This will be the first full year of blogging where my number of posts has increased from the year before. That's what's underemployment will do for you I say.