Carol Berg of Indiana is blogging today about questions she has regarding how to use a church website for outreach to unbelievers. I’ve left a comment on her blog and encouraged her to visit the blogs and websites of several Christian web strategists (see the links in the right-hand column). Why not visit her site and add your own two cents?

I’ve just been reading a new blog by Google software engineer Matt Cutts. According to Matt, one of his goals for the site is to give “advice on solid, common-sense search engine optimization.”

One of his earliest posts, Step Into My Shoes, recounts his email correspondence with a website owner whose site had been banned from Google’s index because of some questionable (i.e. spammish) aspects of the site. It’s a fascinating read into Google’s perspective on how some less-than-reputable search engine optimization companies attempt to trick the search engines into giving high rankings to websites.

I’m looking forward to reading Matt’s blog on a regular basis as I think it’s going to provide a great resource for website owners.

Also, make sure to head on over to Keith Seabourn’s blog and read about ethical and effective search engine optimization (I learned about this entry on Keith’s site from Rob Williams of Effective Web Ministry Notes who echoes Keith’s perspective).

Here’s a good article on Campus Crusade’s LeaderU.com website.

For a long time, I’ve quoted the following statistic in presentations I give and documents I write on internet evangelism:

Every second, nearly 36 individual web pages come online (just to put that in perspective, in the United States, there is a birth every 8 seconds).

Now comes this related statistic from Technorati, cited in this BBC News article:

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati.

In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March.

It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months.

The rest of the article, while interesting, does not really break any new ground.

Forbes has a good summary of the growing use of instant messaging among teens (instead of email). Email is still used heavily by older internet users and in corporate environments, but will instant messaging be the dominant online communication mode in the future? And if so, what are the implications for online evangelism?

Hiawatha Bray, a technology writer for The Boston Globe, recently wrote an article entitled, “Mega-Churches Spread The Word Via High-Tech.” Most of the article was regarding how churches are spending a great deal of money on technology to serve their existing membership, but the end of the article caught my eye:

Pastors are trying to reach out to a new generation of spiritual seekers, people who can carry on five instant-messaging conversations at once and who think the word Google is a verb. Stained glass windows probably won’t impress these religious newbies, but a good Web page might help.

Food for thought.

The latest issue of YouthWorker Journal has an article by Renee Altson entitled Virtual Community: The New Frontier.

Reading it reminded me of something I heard Leonard Sweet say once. He said that those of my generation (I was born in 1959) tend to see the internet as an information source - a place to find facts, data, etc. But those who are younger than myself tend to see the internet as a community - a place to make friends, grow relationships, etc.

The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel ran a story yesterday entitled, “Godcasts Booming Across The Internet” which details the growth of podcasts for religious purposes.

Godcasts, religious and spiritually themed podcasts, have been fruitful and multiplied, becoming the most popular use of the new online technology since it debuted less than a year ago. Searches for “Godcast” and “pod preachers” increased 355 percent in just one month this spring, according to the Internet search engine Lycos, on par with searches for the super model Naomi Campbell and the television show “ER.”

It makes for interesting reading and got me thinking a bit about what, if anything, I might want to do along these lines.

I was trying out BlogPulse today and came across two new blogs (well, new to me anyway!) which cover the subject of internet evangelism:

The Appian Way
The four different contributors describe the blog in this way: “The Web is the new ‘Appian Way’—a technology that accelerates spreading the gospel throughout the world—and we get to be some of the builders. How cool is that?”

Web Evangelism Issues
Author Alex Yefetov of Kiev, Ukraine describes his blog in this way: “Useful notes about e-vangelism strategies I ran across while surfing on the net.”

I’d encourage you to visit these worthwhile sites.

News.com recently ran an interesting article about the news reading habits of web users.

One caveat to note is that the article does not say one-fifth of all people prefer online news - only one-fifth of web users. I suppose, in some senses, that we could even see that as a relatively lower percentage. It’s also a first-time study from Nielsen/NetRatings.

I’m commenting on it here because I think it is a trend (or the absence of one!) to keep an eye on. If more and more people begin to turn to the web to receive news (and especially if they increasingly turn to the web for local news), it deserves some attention from the Christian community.

How can local news portals, run by a local Christian consortium (churches, ministries, individuals, etc.), serve to help reach the world for Christ? We’re headed that direction with ChristianCruz.com and the as yet unlaunched SantaCruzLife.com. And Blews.net is a growing network of web-based projects headed in that same direction.

Since I have an interest in both citizen journalism and local blogging, I found PotreroHillSF.com to be of interest. It began on May 27 of this year and is self-described as “A community blog for the neighbors of Potrero Hill.”

Interesting how the backyard fence is (or may be) being replaced by digital communication avenues. Not sure what I think of it philosophically (the backyard fence, I think, has valuable aspects that can’t be replaced by the digital approach), but it definitely is something the Christian community should keep its eye on as a possible means of outreach.

The Emerging Evangelism blog has a wonderful article today about evangelism and relationships. I would encourage you to go and read it, but I suggest that you make a small change to it in your mind. Anywhere the article uses the word “evangelism,” replace it in your mind with “web evangelism.”

(Web) evangelism is all about relationships, because Christianity is all about relationships. Remove relationship from any attempt at (web) evangelism, and it will fail 99% of the time.

Makes you go “hmmmmm ....”