This woman ran around in the street, peed on her neighbor’s front porch and even appeared in court days later… all while wearing her favorite outfit. full story

On NPR today I heard about the Chicago Tribune’s paper-based newspaper redesign.  It’s not too often that you hear about a newspaper redesigning their paper format, since everything is heading towards becoming web-based. I was curious and looked into it more.  I encourage you to go over and watch the video about the Chicago Tribune redesign on their website.

Although I haven’t actually got my hands on the new paper - Ironically, I heard about it on the radio and then previewed it on the web - I can already tell that this is an amazing improvement to what current newspapers have to offer.  They’ve pulled style and design elements from the web and magazine culture and wonderfully integrated it into their paper.

Some of the new features include:

• Large Images - In a world of diminishing reader attention span this makes a big improvement.  It also brightens up the classic “smudgy black” on white bringing a magazine-like feel to the newspaper.
• “Digg-style” Pagination - Linear page numbering of pages helps the readers not feel lost in a huge stack of sections (no more “Go to Section E8″?)
• Stacked Logo - This gives the newspaper new real estate for a “featured” section in the header bringing another story “above the fold” on the frontpage.
• Vibrant Identity for Sections - The News, Sports, Lifestyle, etc. sections now have improved “branding” which gives the newspaper a more modern magazine feel.

Print and web are sisters in the world of design.  Their threading of new contemporary design elements have, much like you do in a website redesign, increased their UI, the overall readability of the newspaper, and most importantly their User Experience which will no doubt pay off in the long run.

Well, I can honestly say that Paravel has made it big.  We will be teaming up with one of the coolest cafes in the lone star state… The Blue Bonnet Cafe

I have been enjoying their pie happy hour since before knee boarding was cool.

Fast Fwd to 1:50 to see a “quint-flipple”

Stay tuned as we are all really excited to be working with such a Texas Institution.

Today i’ve been on location representing TEAM PVEL at the first ever #churchtechcamp at Fuller Seminary in Los Angeles, CA.  What is #churchtechcamp?  Well the website says:

#churchtechcamp is a localized unconference for people of faith to gather and share their own best practices and “in the field” insights.

I’m sure this camp is just like other camps (foocamp, barcamp, wordcamp, rubycamp, etc etc etc… the list goes on and on).  A group of thinkinker coming together to discuss a topic.  It’s got all the pre-requisites:

• Speakers
• A live webcast
• People blogging about it

Being the first of it’s kind - and hopefully not the last - there was a lot of open discussions after brief presentations.

The morning has focused mostly on using the web & technology for The Church.  The main theme was discussed how an “Opensource Church” or “Church 2.0″ would hurt/help/change The Church.  Here’s a break down of the mornings talks:

1. Ex-CIO of Saddleback Church, Eric Busby speaking on Missions and Technology.  And the following discussions talked about how technology can serve “missions”.
2. Matt Frazier (or was it Lance Bauslaugh) then spoke about their “web 3.0″ app, Unifyer, which allows churches to create “sites” which users can determine which part of that “site” they see.  It’s a reaaaaal cool concept and even before I knew I was going to see them speak, I thought it was a cool product.  This spawned an intense discussion about 
3. Robert Yang of Kindle (a realtime online prayer resource) wrapped up the morning.  Kindle’s product really speaks for itself and how useful it could be to a church or community.

After a “user-generated lunch”, the afternoon was comprised of a series of “powertalks” about the church.  Quick summaries follow:

1. First John Saddington (Human3rror & gospelr.com) spoke about online communities. His site has a pretty-pretty powerpoint presentation on the topic.  I recommend having a look through it. 
2. Then Tony Steward put on the nerd glasses spoke about how to GTD (”Get Things Done”) and various productivity applications for download and on the web.  
3. DJ Chuang then talked about whether or not blogging still matters.  Which is quite a good & relevant question according to a recent TechCrunch article “The State of the Blogosphere”.  Are blogs dying?  Experts might say “Yes”.
4. Lastly Andrew Seely  to using Twitter (and other stuff) to foster community.  It was a brief yet poignant talk.

In all i enjoyed the first #churchtechcamp and I think it’s a great group of men and women who look forward to aiding the Church. Not just being hip, tech-saavy, mac users -but into a incubator of innovation.   It fostered lots of discussion about how the church can use current and emerging technologies to make a “glocal” (Glocal => Global + Local) impact to communities.

And with that, I’d like to shamelessly self promote my “freetime” side project: SOSOJU.org

hopefully it speaks for itself, but it’s in super beta right now. why i choose to code up super projects in my freetime *much to my wife’s chagrin*, i don’t know

But what I do know -thanks to #churchtechcamp-  is that gifts are to be used for world benefit and not for selfish ambition.  I think the secular (atheistic even!) group of thinkers TED, bears a similar cross:  How can we use technology to better the world?

My buddy Ed and I were talking about the latest Alex Jones conspiracy theories (you know, the guy that thinks the government was flying the planes by remote control on 9/11) this week, so I couldn’t help but laugh when I came across this: