RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology is the backbone upon which many of today’s Internet technologies are built. It is nothing more than a standardized way of tagging information (content) so that it can be published and read by other applications or programs. Blogs (short for “Web logs”) are online journals made up of posts. Each post includes a title, content and a date and time stamp. You can read a blog by finding it on the Internet, or you can subscribe to it and have the information come right to your inbox, via the “feeds” section of your browser. You can also subscribe to a feed through an aggregator such as Bloglines or Google Reader.

Podcasts are blogs (or RSS feeds) that contain an audio file. Since it is a feed, you can subscribe to it, and it will automatically be downloaded to free programs like iTunes or the Zune Marketplace. If audio isn’t good enough, you can subscribe to vodcasts, which allow you to download video the same way. Both podcasts and vodcasts can be listened to or watched on a computer. Or, with a quick sync between your computer and your personal media player (such as an iPod or Zune), you can listen to or watch a weekend service while running on the treadmill at the gym.

Rich Media

The term “rich media” refers to a variety of things but has become synonymous with online video. Technology has advanced to the point where video is becoming the preferred method for presenting information. For churches, this presents at least three opportunities.

The first is the ability to present created media and small clips pulled from services on church Web sites in some form of media player. The second is the ability to upload these clips to YouTube and take advantage of the viral marketing that occurs when people can quickly access and share our video clips with those in their social networks. If you are already creating rich media for use in services, there is no reason not to make it available on YouTube. We have the ability to stream entire services online. There are limitations to the size and quality of the video we can stream, but we will soon be able to stream high-definition (HD) video for use on computers and HD televisions. Internet Protocol TV is an emerging technology allowing digital content to be downloaded directly to televisions for convenient viewing. In the future, we will be able to download or subscribe to digital content that will be available to us at any time for any device (computer, television, PDA, mobile phone, etc.).