Today, we are often faced with many challenges that inhibit us from attending a church on Sundays. Many churches that I am in communication with are now having a worship service on Sunday evening, that have two main goals. One of those being to allow members/attenders to worship because they are not able to make it on Sunday mornings. Two...to give room for more people to attend on Sundays.

Another option I have noticed here more recently is the advent of streaming the services online. This seems to be a more cost efficient method with the popularity of the Flash video encoding. This allows the video/audio image to be crisp and clean, yet not too bandwidth consuming. Even so, the turnout seems to be good for the services.

Many people have family situations or have to work in this day and age on Sunday. They can still connect with the church via a video stream while also allowing them to worship and be fed spiritually at the same time. This is hopefully another reason that churches allow streaming of their services.

Back in the 80's and 90's, many churches had to pay a lot of money to have their services broadcast on television stations. This was a lot of work and expense. Trust me, I worked at a church doing this. I think with the advent of the internet, it is more feasible for churches to send a live video and audio feed to the online community. This would require about the same amount of money up front to purchase and maintain the systems, but at the same time, internet broadcasting is a much cheaper medium of sharing God's message. Plus, you are not limited to a specific time block. You can stream the entire service because the ministry controls what goes out there.

I "attended" a church stream about a month ago. I was fascinated with how it worked, mainly because this church had a chat room contained within. Viewers could chat with pastors and seek prayer for specific needs that the person had. I thought this was a great asset to add to the streaming service. That way, it makes the viewer feel more connected with the church's broadcast ministry.

I want to hear from you guys. What do you think about online worship services? Do you have any experiences that you would like to share?

Thanks for taking the time to read.
-Ken

Labels: 316 networks, Buckhead Church, Chapel Hill, church, digital, FIrst Orlando, Flash, God, gospel, informative, internet, internet growth, Media, North Point, Orlando, Scott Link, simulcast

Today, the internet search giant, Google encountered some "turbulence" when attempting to adjust some key routing numbers, in an on-going effort to transition from an older networking standard to a newer one called IPv6. This was a major issue for the search giant, leaving about 14% of their user-base in the internet dark.

Larger ISP networks that "peer" off of Google, such as AT&T, Verizon and others that are interconnected with the Google networks were effected greatly by this glitch. Google did have a backup system which became activated. This server is based in Asia, and was not designed to handle the amount of traffic the internet threw at it. This caused a major traffic issue, just as a simple car accident can bog down an interstate for miles. Google had the glitch repaired, stories report, by 9:14am PST.

Was this a forgivable mistake? Or should we start tallying up the points for Google? The way I see it, although it may be annoying or an inconvience at the time it occured, things happen. Google does, have backups for when a specific cluster of servers goes down, which is good. I have no beef with Google. I do rely very heavily upon Google. From e-mail, calendar, blogging, chat, news gathering, maps, research...blah blah. I would say about 80% of my internet activity would not exist without Google. What is amazing though is that a major glitch was repaired within an hour and everything was back up and working properly. If this had been a larger period of time, things may be different.

Point number two. I think patience has lost its value in society today. People seem to be in "I need it NOW" type of mindset. They then proceed to throw a hissy fit when time is not in their favor. One of many things that my parents drilled into my head is patience. When I see people demainding something "now" then observing the temper tantrum afterward, I just sit back and realize...do they know what kind of fools they are making of themselves? Really? What would they be thinking if they were watching themselves through my eyes?

Do some thinking. Take today and be patient. Even if it takes a few more seconds than longer to do something simple on the computer, calm down. Does that five seconds really matter that much in the long run??

-Ken

Read the complete story here.

Labels: application, att, glitch, gmail, google, hissy fit, internet, ipv6, mistakes, patience, verizon