Chris Ames, Author at ChurchMag

Adapting Online Viral Formulas to an Offline Church

August 18, 2010
by Chris Ames

Have you ever noticed that going viral online is usually an accident? I mean on one hand typical bloggers write posts that they hope will go viral. Or that they wouldn’t mind going viral. But very few people generate content that’s good enough to go viral on a routine basis.

Matt Inman of The Oatmeal is an exception to this rule. He manages to create cartoons that capture the attention, and funny bone, of thousands upon thousands of readers. I was reading The Oatmeal Guide to Getting 5 Million Unique Visitors a Month, which discusses the technique behind The Oatmeal’s success, and started wondering if they applied to our churches.

55 Web Designers and Developers to Follow on Twitter

August 17, 2010
by Chris Ames

The best way I’ve found to learn and grow is to surround myself with people smarter than me. Something I’ve discovered is that this doesn’t alway have to mean people I know, people I work with, or people I am friends with at the moment. Thanks to Twitter, I can surround myself with a veritable University of genius by following the right people.

The fine folks at Web Design Ledger have assembled a list of 50 Web Designers and Developers to follow on Twitter. And while the list is good, I did notice a few heavy hitters that were absent from the list.

Win a Friggin’ Battle Axe from WuFoo

August 16, 2010
by Chris Ames

One of the things I love about the web is that it inspires creativity. Not only that, but fresh ideas are rewarded. Which means it not only inspires creativity, but it also perpetuates creativity.

Win.

Case in point, check out this contest from online form creation tool WuFoo.

Server Fault: Crowd-source Your IT Roadblocks

August 16, 2010
by Chris Ames

Server Fault represents crowd-sourcing at it’s finest and I find myself searching it on a weekly basis for answers to my technical questions. It is a companion site in the Stack Exchange network and, in their own words:

Server Fault is a Q&A site for system administrators and IT professionals that’s free.

But is it like the thousands of other technical answer sites thrashing about on the web? No, actually. I really think these guys have tapped into a winning formula.