Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Church and Social Media Today

Here is my recommended reading list:

Catholic New Media Conference - Day 1

I'm in Arlington, TX through Saturday morning for the Catholic New Media Conference.  It's being held in the same place and at the same time as the Catholic Marketing Network Trade Show and the Catholic Writers' Guild meet-up, at the Arlington Convention Center.

I arrived Tuesday night, and the CNMC began Wednesday.  There were two tracks:  the standard track and the developers' track.  I attended the developers' track, which was focused on apps, APIs, and collaboration.  I have recently put together an API (CatechismAPI) for searching and presenting the Catechism of the Catholic Church and have a web site that uses it very simply to let people search the Catechism how (I think) people really need to search it.

The first session was on seven strategies for building a good web site for your organization, presented by Josh of eCatholic.  The second session was an expo of Catholic apps, programs, and APIs.  There were presentations on the Catholic Diocese App, Logos, Divine Office, CatechismAPI (my work), and Flocknote.

I received great feedback and a very positive response to my work.  More about that in another post.

I met Matthew Warner, Jeff Geerling, and Brandon Vogt, who I knew through Twitter.  I can't say I put a face to a name, since we've all got pictures of our heads on Twitter.  It was nice to meet them in the flesh; it was very Catholic, very incarnational.  I also met other Twitter friends: Sr. Anne (the Nun Blogger), Jeffrey Ketterer, and Craig Berry.  And I began to network with people who do app development and could help make the CatechismAPI come alive on the mobile platform.

After lunch I stopped by the Our Sunday Visitor booth to get a copy of Brandon Vogt's book The Church and the New Media, signed by the author of course.  Then I attended a session on the importance of standards in app and API development.

Next I did a book signing at the Catholic Writers' Guild booth at the CMN Trade Show.  I also spoke with a few book distributors to see if there was any interest in my books.  After that I went to the developers' session on collaboration.

I had dinner with Matthew, Jeff, Jeff, Dane Falkner (of the Divine Office app), Kevin Knight (of NewAdvent.org), and Ian Rutherford (of Aquinas and More Books), and a few others; we ate across the street from the hotel and conference center, at El Fenix.

After dinner I listened in on Jeff Cavins' talk/pitch about Walking Toward Eternity, his new series from Ascension Press.  That was followed by a screening of Restless Heart: The Confessions of Augustine, a feature-film-length non-animated dramatization of the life of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.  It was really quite good.

That was a full day.  Today there's a single track... but I'll post about it later.