In the heart of “1000 Journals” I’d like to send out 5 blank journals into the Catholic community. The holder of the journal has the special opportunity to share their faith with other Catholics in words, art, or whatever other way the spirit moves them. When the holder of the journal has created an entry page, he now has the obligation of passing it onto another faithful person, with the hopes that the journals will one day be completed and returned to me. When I have received a completed journal, I will share the journal pages, in both picture and video form, online so that others can enjoy. I have titled the project “One Voice, One Church.”

With the funds, I plan to purchase five really nice journals and items to make them unique and set them apart from just any ordinary journal. Each journal will have specific guidelines and directions on how the current holder can keep the community updated on the specific journal’s whereabouts. Also, some of the funds may go toward the shipping of the journals to different parts of the World (Japan, Canada, and opposite sides of the United States). Be assured that if we go above and beyond the goal of $125, that the extra funds will go towards better journals or perhaps we could up the number of journals that we send out. But, if we do not reach the goal, then the project fails and we all go back to our boring lives ; )

Ultimately, I hope that people have fun with this project and that we will be inspired by one another, and by the gifts that God has given us!

I’m asking any and all who read this to help me spread the word about this project. Feel free to rip the audio from my YouTube video and use it in your Podcast, Blog about the project, Share the project with your Facebook and Twitter friends, tell someone about it while you are socializing after Mass. The link to my Kickstarter Page is” http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/710603221/one-voice-one-church-5-journals and the hash tag that I plan to use on Twitter once the project is funded will be #1voice1church.

Thanks for being a part of this!

- Josh

Below are some related links to this topic:

• “The Human Experience” Screening in Cleveland, OH
• The Princess, The Priest and the War for the Perfect Wedding
• “The Meal Box” for the Kindle

1. The Kindle App for the Droid & How Joel from Life in Ohio Podcast uses it (Audio)
2. Mac Jobs? (This cracked me up when I saw it)
3. Homily on Technology (Video)
4. How “Catholic” Should You Be Online?
5. eXclaim! and CD Winner (Yeah that’s me in the bright yellow shirt : )

*Bonus Tweet
*Follow-up to Bonus Tweet

If you have a blogpost that you would like to share with me feel free to contact Catholic Tech Tips and I will get it.

Have a great weekend!

Joshua

When I saw a request for a guest blogger for the CNMC, I jumped at the chance to share about my experience. This year the Catholic New Media Celebration was held at the Pastoral Center of the Archdiocese of Boston in Braintree, MA and I had the joy and pleasure of of being able to attend. I also attended last year when it was held in San Antonio. This event was hosted by the Star Quest Production Network (SQPN) and included a Meet and Greet and a full day event.

I have been involved with SQPN for a few years and this community has been so great to me and I have made so many amazing online friends through the social networks with the folks in this community. Going to the Celebration for the second year was great because I was able to meet friends I met in person last year and also meet many people who did not attend last year. The most fun part of going to the CNMC is being able to put actual faces to the Twitter avatars. It was so great to get to meet so many of these friends and have a great time with all of them this weekend.

I came in very late on Thursday night because my flight was delayed an hour because of storms in Boston. Many people who also came in Thursday were delayed. Instead of staying in the hotel with everyone else, I stayed with my friends Jeff and Zina in Cambridge. During the day on Friday I took two tours of Harvard and of Boston and then it was time for the Meet and Greet to begin. I took an afternoon with another family and we walked over to the hotel together (where the gathering was taking place).

The Meet and Greet was hosted by The Catholic Company and there was great food and wonderful friends. The whole event (both Friday night and all day Saturday) were broadcast on Ustream. The computer for the stream was stationary and Fr. Roderick was recording an episode of “The Break” near it. That episode, featuring interviews of attendees can be found here. All videos can still be viewed on the Ustream page found here.

The main event occurred on Saturday. Around 9 am, Mac Barron, of Catholic in a Small Town, made some opening remarks, very much in the style of Steve Jobs (complete with black t-shirt). He presented the fact that SQPN now has 6 gazillion downloads (or some similar crazy number). He also presented shows we currently have on the network and ones that were rejected that are similar such as “Catholic in Da Hood.” Many of us agreed on Twitter (many of us were live-tweeting the day) that although “Catholic Drinkie” was rejected, it sounded like a great idea! So much so that there’s now a Twitter account for it! Mac did a great job and we were all very entertained. He knows how to start off this event very well.

After his talk, Scot Landry, Secretary for Catholic Media of the Archdiocese of Boston, welcomed us. He was followed by Pat Gohn who welcomed us and gave us the layout for where things were in the building. Fr. Roderick then welcomed us and said the opening prayer. Mac then introduced the morning keynote speaker, Fr. Robert Reed of CatholicTV.

The theme of his talk was “Spirituality and Catechesis in New Media.” Main points: The Holy Scriptures are the root of our Tradition and the foundation of our faith, icons make God present, our work makes God present as well and we need to be fed as we feed others. Here are photos of the four gifts. The “Bit-O-Honey” was his favorite candy as a child.

After a break, the sessions started. There were three tracks with a few sessions each: podcasting and blogging and a new track for children. I went to two podcasting sessions and one blogging session throughout the day. The podcasting track featured Cliff Ravenscraft and Fr. Roderick, two of my favorite people. In the first session they explained (with a great Keynote presentation) how the whole podcasting thing works: you record your show on an mp3 file, save it in the internet cloud, upload it to a website, create an RSS feed on the website, submit to iTunes and then listeners download to their player or computer. It was very informative and helpful. They also were able to address questions from the audience and gave a few tips and suggestions for equipment.

After another break, the second session of the morning started. I attended a session in the blogging track presented by Sarah Reinhard. She is a very adorable pregnant lady with a lot of guts (she wore a cowboy hat at the Meet and Greet on a dare)! The Three C’s of Blogging according to Sarah are Community, Content, Catechesis.

In this session, we were seated in small groups and each group had a basket of objects. Our task through the session was to choose an object and decide what kind of blog we could make around it. Overall, it was a great session, and I learned a lot from it. Even if you are very experienced at something, there is always more to learn.

After the lunch break, Lino Rulli, of Catholic Guy Show on Sirius XM Radio and Lino at Large on SQPN, had the afternoon keynote. Anyone that listens to any of his shows knows that he is self-deprecating and hilarious. This talk was no different. He started things out right by entering from the back of the room to the theme music of “Eye of the Tiger.”

Lino encouraged us to explore what we are passionate about. He is passionate about entertaining people and now does it for a living. He told us that all forms of media are art. It takes work to make it successful. Study what works to make it better. He also encouraged us to ask who we want our audience to be and who do you want to reach? Most importantly: “Make it new, fresh, different, quality. Make the name ‘new media’ mean something.”

At the end, he took out his iPad and read some of the mean things that people have posted about him online. He was having trouble managing the iPad and this happened:
Lino: I hate this thing (iPad)
Sr. Anne (from the audience): I’ll take it!

After the keynote, we had a break and then the final breakout session. I went to the final session on podcasting. In this one, Cliff and Fr. Roderick broke down how you put together a show, what equipment is needed and how you set it up. They suggested a website for music and explained the “7 second rule:” start the music loud and in 7 seconds, decrease volume and speak. Your name, title, what show is and the topic at beginning of each show.

Cliff drew what goes into the mixer and where and then they showed it with actual equipment. At the end of show, state ways to get a hold of you and other important information. Use a pop filter for your microphone unless one is built in. Have your show notes in a window on the screen or on piece of paper. A separate screen than the one you are recording on is better. Use Libsyn for hosting and use the RSS feed they provide to send to Feedburner. Add the new podcast in iTunes. It was an extremely helpful session and I learned a lot.

After an hour break, Cardinal Sean O’Malley made some remarks. He is very passionate about new media (he blogs weekly) and encouraged us to do all we can to use it to share the Gospel. Fr. Roderick then gave some closing remarks and ended with a prayer and invited the cardinal up for a blessing. With that, the CNMC was over – it went so fast!

That ended the formal events of the weekend. I had dinner with Jeff and Zina, and then on Sunday went to mass at a church on the North End and did some sightseeing on the HarborWalk and the Public Garden. I went back home Sunday night.

I am so happy to be a part of the SQPN community and am so grateful for all the friends I have met (and have been able to meet in person at CNMC!) through this community. I highly encourage you to check out some of the shows on SQPN because they produce some amazing programs.

Thank you to all the friends that I have met and those that I have yet to meet. I look forward to continuing to nurture relationships in this community. I’m “angelsteph” on Twitter and I’d love to meet you if I haven’t already! I also have a blog titled Steph’s Random Thoughts. For the last few days I have been posting very detailed recaps of each day of my trip and the last one was posted on Thursday.

If you wish to view all 388 of my photos (and a few my friends took), they are all posted on Flickr I welcome your comments on this posts and on my photos.

~Stephanie

Hi everyone,

I am back from Malaysia. The mosquito netting around my hut didn’t work very well. I have more bites than I have ever had….

Ok. You know I wasn’t actually there but scammed. John (my step-dad) said there were a lot of concerned people, but he wouldn’t have raised enough money to get me home. (Although a friend of ours who took it seriously said he would do whatever it took, as I’m sure you would, too)

So now I have a new email address  and I am also getting a new cell phone, but don’t have it yet. I am really out of touch! But there is always the old fashioned telephone.

I am sending this to myself so I can copy and paste all of you.

Take Care,

Mona

This scam has been around in many forms. It was actually around before most of us even knew what e-mail was.  You would get a letter in the mail (not usually from someone you knew though).  Through the past couple of years these scammers have used all sorts of online means to take advantage of genuinely caring people.  Dr. Phil (not that I watch him everyday or anything) had a special a couple years back about how Nigerian scammers were using online dating sites to pull off similar scams.  This was even worse, because these women (generally it is women who are targeted) would develop emotional attachments to the scammer’s persona.  A couple of the women on the show, even after learning that they had been taken for their life savings, still said that they loved “him” (as if “he” was a real person).  And even after Dr. Phil brought out the model, who’s picture the scammer ripped from the internet to use as his persona’s profile picture on the dating, the women still said they had feelings for this fictitious character.

About a month after this episode aired, my wife came home from work and said that a co-worker friend of hers had met a guy online form New Jersey, who had lost his passport, wallet, and stuff, and he need her to wire her some money through Western Union (a common practice of scammers).  My wife, luckily warned her about the scam and we let her borrow the DVD-R which we had recorded the Dr. Phil episode.

I feel really bad for older folks who are finally learning how to use e-mail and feeling somewhat comfortable doing so, but could very easily fall prey to an online scammer.  Online scammers are either sole-less, or desperate.  And their victims are some of the most compassionate and charitable.  Perhaps this is how the bad guys justify what they are doing.  Either way, it is still despicable.

“Have you ever fallen to an online scam or know someone who has?  If so…” (I really don’t watch Dr. Phil every day : )

1. The Opening Keynote Address at the June 22, 2008 Catholic New Media Celebration
2. The Morality of Jailbreaking
3. How Google Editions Will Change eBook Publishing, Selling
4. 10 suggestions for using Social Media at Catholic Organizations
5. 7 Deadly Sins of the Parish Website (fast-forward to the 9:50 marker)

*Bonus Tweet

If you have a blogpost that you would like to share with me feel free to contact Catholic Tech Tips and I will get it.

Have a great weekend!

Joshua

Here are links to these great websites:

• EncouragePriests.org
• CatholicsComeHome.org
• CatolicosRegresen.org

First off, Google has a whole slew of privacy policies that you can go through at your leisure, they can be found here.

The following are what I feel to be the key points of the Gmail terms/privacy policy:

When you use Gmail, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).

Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.

We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked. We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view.  Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

Ok, now, remember that these terms of use are also coupled with Google’s Privacy Policy and are separate from the terms of service for their other products and services.

So, here is the breakdown.

When you use Gmail, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).

Google does log each time a user visits Gmail, what they clicked on and how long they were there, in addition to what data was displayed.  Now, from my understanding of the first point, I think that refers to what TYPE of content, not the content itself.  Basically, Google’s log servers know that a user viewed an email, but, not the email itself.  At least, in this point on the list.

Now, the next point is the one that I feel to be very important.

Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.

Now, at first there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this statement.  Google will maintain and process your email for you.  Being that Gmail is an email service, this makes sense.  However, the next line in regards to how they display ads is a little less innocent.

Now, using your IP address to display ads isn’t that big of a deal.  Your IP address is a unique identifier for your computer or router on the internet.  It can be roughly linked to your location, or at least your town, which, allows ads to be tailored to where you live, again, not too bad.

After the comma, someone might notice the words content of the message. This means that in some way or fashion, most likely through an automated computerized process, Google scans the text of your emails in order to display ads.  Now, does this mean there is someone hand-reading your personal emails and saving them on file for a later date?  Probably not.  However, if a company was concerned about the privacy of internal company emails having trade secrets, I wouldn’t be using Gmail.

Now, again, keep in mind that Google’s main business is advertising.  The whole reason that they provide the public with such great, free resources is for the sake of putting ads into them.  The ads need to be tailored to the user viewing them and Google must find some way to do that tailoring.  The processes they use to do this are automated but, also secret.  So one can assume in two different directions on this.

Either:

A. Google uses a completely automated process to scan emails briefly in addition to using your IP address, to be able to display ads that appear to be relevant to you.  That process does not “know” or “understand” the content of your emails and is just scanning for key words, etc.

or

B. Google’s servers not only look for keywords in emails but, know exactly what they are about and know every detail or your private life.  They then hold onto this information to hand on to advertisers so that they can blackmail you into buying their products.

Alright, maybe not AS extreme as suggestion B but, there are people out there who claim that Google is hording their private information and selling it to advertisers, etc.

The next point brings some level of comfort though:

We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked. We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

Now, if someone really looks into this, including the Google Privacy Policy, there really isn’t much to worry about.  Google does provide advertisers with what ads were clicked and displayed.  The ONLY time that Google will provide your name, address, phone number, social security number, driver’s license or anything else of that nature is if a user SPECIFICALLY allow this, such as in using Google Checkout on a website.  They are NOT sending users’ emails to advertisers.

Again, Google DOES, in an automated fashion, scan a user’s emails while being displayed in order to display relevant ads.  While this doesn’t appear to pose an issue to the everyday user, businesses should still use their internal company email systems for private emails, trade secrets or other such information.  Better safe than sorry.

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view.  Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

Finally, Google does reserve the right to hold onto the data from emails, even if a user deletes them.  I am not sure why they might want to indefinitely hold on to deleted emails in their offline backup systems, but, the point is that they can.  Google has already promised not to send that information to anyone else so, the reason why they would want to hold them is completely unknown.  Maybe for diagnostic or statistical information…who knows.  The point is, Google can hold onto a user’s emails as long as they want, even after deleting them from their “active” servers.  Again, this is why Gmail is NOT good for business use.

So, overall, I think Gmail is safe for personal use.  If a user is really paranoid about what Google might be doing with their emails or what Google might be sharing with others, they can still go to other services such as AOL Mail, Yahoo, Windows Live Mail and other such services.  I doubt that they have the same amount of storage space or the search capabilities of Gmail, not to mention the other Google apps.

I am hoping to do a full treatise on internet privacy on CatholiTech.com in the near future but, it will take some time.

Hope that helps!

God Bless,
Chris

1. 5 Things I Learned From “LOST”
2. Southern African Bishops Conference’s World Cup Video (Now this is how it’s done!)
3. Celebrating the Holy Mass from an iPad? (Great Discussion)
4. Evangelization: In with the ‘new,’ while maintaining the old
5. 10 Types of Blog Comments: Part 2 of 2

*Bonus Tweet

If you have a blogpost that you would like to share with me feel free to contact Catholic Tech Tips and I will get it.

Have a great weekend!

Joshua

Examples of when you might use #churchmoments:

1. Today’s Responsorial Psalm really spoke to my heart #churchmoments
2. This dude in front of me was reading along with the Scripture readings using an all-braille Roman Missal. Pretty Cool! #churchmoments
3. I attended Mass at St Luke’s in Danville, #Ohio this morning. http://twitpic.com/1qikd3 #churchmoments

Examples of when NOT to use #churchmoments:

1. I’m tweeting during Mass
2. Fr. Bill’s  Homily was so boring.
3. I’m hungry for a Wendy’s Baconator (Okay, maybe this one would be fine if you posted it after Mass, and were honestly craving a Wendy’s Baconator : )

The point of the #churchmoments hashtag is to share with others our church experiences. They might be cute, funny, honest, real, uplifting, uniting, or just something that had occurred while at church, a church function, or on the way to/from church.

Share with us your Church Moments by using the #churchmoments hashtag : )