Websites – Page 3 – My Thought Spot

How is MissionaryTalks.com doing?

I was digging through some podcast websites today that sounded like they might interest me. I was surprised and scared at what I found. Then I started asking myself if Missionary Talks (my main podcast) has the same problems.

The shows I checked out were listed as “religious.” Other than knowing their name and that they should be religious in some way, I knew nothing about the shows. Some I did not even go to because their name told me that I would not be interested (that’s a good thing) or I couldn’t figure out what the show might be about based on their name (that’s a bad thing). As far as a name goes, I think Missionary Talks is a good name for a show. It does not tell you exactly what the show is about, but I think most could figure out that it has something to do with missionaries and that it is conversational or instructional rather than musical.

When I arrived at the websites of the shows that passed the first test I had trouble finding information immediately on the front page that tells about the show. Most had the standard blog post with a few words about the episode and an audio link. But I still had trouble figuring out from the episode posts what the general tone of the podcast was. I did not do this for all the shows, but even clicking through to the standard “about” page left me puzzled about the content of some of them. Is the masthead explanation of Missionary Talks sufficient? Or do I need a little blurb at the top of the sidebar that gives a bit more detail?

None of the sites I looked at gave me any indication as to how long each episode was. I know we, as podcasters, are not bound by a time limit (though I think each one should have a goal), but I could get no feel for how long any of the episodes were without either downloading an episode or starting to play the episode from the website. (This was not always available, nor was the information about episode length always listed on the embedded player.) At Missionary Talks I have the show length stated at the bottom of each post. Does anyone but me care about episode length?

I am curious to get feedback on the impression you get when you go to the Missionary Talks website. I am looking at refreshing the site with some new graphics and maybe a color scheme change. While doing all this I want to make any informational changes that will help potential new listeners become immediately comfortable with navigating the site. Any input is helpful. What bugs you about Missionary Talk? What do you love about it that you think shouldn’t change?

By the way, I didn’t subscribe to any of the podcasts I went to look at. I guess I was too depressed by what I found.

Clean Casts

I found a new podcast listing site last week and got Missionary Talks listed there. It is called Clean Casts. All the podcasts listed on the site are either G or PG rated. It is not a huge listing of podcasts yet, but it is nice to know that you can choose something there that will be family friendly.

There are a few podcasts that I listen to listed there, but there are several other good podcasts that should be there. I should compile a list and contact my podcasting friends to get their shows listed there and help grow the community. The site is fairly new and needs help getting some momentum pushing them the right way.

GTD for Pastors

Today I was listening to the Spiritual Leadership Podcast with Paul Chappell and he was talking about Developing an Annual Plan. If you are familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) then you will recognize several items that Dr. Chappell outlines in this lesson. While Dr. Chappell does not get into a daily breakdown of how to get tasks accomplished in this lesson, he does talk heavily about roles that we have in our lives and ministries and how they affect our planning for the new year.

While this is not an actual application of GTD to running a church or ministry, it does track heavily with what David Allen teaches.

The thing that I find most difficult to manage in my ministry is “crisis management.” Both Allen and Chappell talk about how that we sometimes get sucked into the trap of managing what is urgent and not what is important. I sometimes allow other peoples’ crisis become my top priority and neglect what I should be doing.

This installment of the Spiritual Leadership Podcast was a practical application of how to define planning based on the roles being played.

Trying out LingQ

In an effort to help brush up on my Spanish in anticipation for the move to Argentina in a few weeks I signed up with LingQ last night. This is a language learning site that has at its core the idea of familiarity before rules. You are given passages to read and audio files to listen to. You are asked to tell what words are known to you and which are new words. I am not sure what all of that will mean in the end, but it does help build a nice list of unfamiliar words that you can specifically study.

There are also forums where you can discuss miscellaneous topics in your language of choice. Currently they boast 10 languages that you can learn on the site. Registration is free and there is quite a bit of study you can do without having to shell out bucks. But for paying customers you can get personalized tutoring based on your needs as represented in the reading and audio portions of the site.

You can also interact with real people. But what Internet junkie would want to do that? I will stick to the training sessions and forums where social interaction is limited.

Have I mentioned Evernote?

Evernote Logo I can’t believe that I have been an avid Evernote user for over a year and have never mentioned it here. Evernote is a note taking application that is web based. You can use the web client to log into your notes and do any manipulation on them that you need. But there are also desktop/phone clients that are native applications that you can use on your computer or phone and have all the info upload to the web storage.

My interest in Evernote started when I was looking for a good way to keep notes and tasks organized on my iPhone. The built in application for taking notes on the phone was awful. The fact that (at the time) the notes taken on the phone did not sync to the computer and therefore were not backed up in any way made it a useless app to me. Especially since I was having such a hard time keeping my phone running.

Evernote allowed me to keep notes on my phone and access them from the web, or from my computer. The notes are immediately sent to the mother ship and are available on my other platforms for viewing or manipulation.

I don’t use Evernote as much as I originally anticipated. Even when I had my beloved Palm based devices, may they rest in peace, I still relied on paper quite a bit to keep my tasks and notes for the day. However, I use Evernote on bigger projects. When I was doing research for a set of lectures I was doing concerning technology and mission work I kept all my notes and research in Evernote. Preparation for any large task where I know there will be a lot of information is a perfect task for Evernote. I also like to snap pictures of articles, not necessarily to read, but to be reminders of something that I want to look up and do further reading on.

The features of Evernote that I use most are tagging and text recognition.

I can take a note (which can be a photo, a sound recording, a saved web page, or a text note) and tag that note with key words that will help me find the note again. While I always have separate notebooks for certain projects, I can also use tags so that when I search for a keyword the notes from several notebooks will come up if they are relevant. I am not limited to just what is in one notebook (folder).

The text recognition that Evernote does is very clever. [This turns very geeky for a moment] If I take a picture that has text in it, then Evernote will search that text too when I do a search for a keyword. They don’t do formal OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the text. They do intelligent guessing. Instead of trying to figure out exactly what the text is, which is very inaccurate, they make several guesses on each word and store their guesses. Then when you search for a term they pull up all the words that they think might fit. Doing it this way is more likely to return a word that you were looking for instead of ignoring anything that might have been one letter off. It is also possible that they would return results that are not what you were looking for, but almost guarantees that they will not miss a valid hit. [Mortals can start reading again] I can take pictures of pages of text and then do a search on something that I know was on that page and it will return that in the results. For a recent paper I submitted for a class I used this to keep track of all my research books and certain pages that I knew I would be referencing several times throughout my paper. It also works on hand-written notes; assuming your writing is readable by normal people.

I don’t use it for all my daily information tasks (partly because they don’t have a native Linux client) but I do rely heavily on it for larger projects. Recently I read a list of 100 ways you can use Evernote. Maybe you can get some ideas from this list as well. One of my favorite items on the list is #60 “Make a list of all of your girlfriends family members names. Use this list to study them before your next big visit.” My question is, is that supposed to be girlfriend’s, or girlfriends’? Since there is no apostrophe (and clearly should be) I have to imagine that the reason you need a tool like Evernote to keep track is you have too many girlfriends to keep the lists straight in your own head.

I don’t know if Evernote will fit your needs, but it certainly has been a help in research and larger projects for me. Otherwise, I just stick to my paper lists.