I love blogs. I love reading them; I love commenting on them; and, mostly, I love the connection that they bring. For instance, I am associated with a group of Church IT bloggers, called the Church IT Roundtable. Even though I have never met most of these guys and never attended an in-person roundtable, they still consider me part of the group.  This group has been my life-line and has bailed me out of a number of problems.  I don’t have to know all the answers; I just need to know how to find them.

I have been training our staff recently on how to use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs. Yesterday, I trained them how to set up a blog on Wordpress.com and gave some of the simple rules of blogging. Why am I pushing this so hard? Below are a few of the examples of why I love blogs:

• When we needed new solutions for printing check-in labels, Jason Powell gave me the name of a good vendor. That began a profitable relationship with deep discounts.
• When I posted about iSCSI frustrations on Twitter, Ed Buford immediately offered to help me out.
• When I posted about our backup strategy, Stuart weighed in on the discussion and gave me some very timely insights.
• The blogs of various Church IT guys have formed a network that provides strength to each church represented. We’re not alone.
• At the ACS Convention last week, Linda from Northwoods asked me how I know Jason Lee. She was a bit surprised that the only connection we have is from blogs. Now he and I can unite to pick on Dean.

This only scratches the surface of the power of blogs and the community that can be created by them. I’m curious if you are a part of a group similar to CITRT, perhaps for Children’s Ministers or Church Business Administrators. Let me know if you are, our staff would love to join the conversation.

I’m headed to the ACS Convention this week, Tuesday the 13th through Friday the 16th. I’ll be attending the ACS IT Roundtable, facilitated by Dean Lisenby on Tuesday and various convention classes during the rest of the week.

If any of you other IT guys are headed down to Houston this week for the convention, I’d love to meet you… hopefully you’ll be in the roundtable as well.

Drop me a comment if you’ll be attending.

I’ll also attempt to live blog and update my Twitter throughout the week.

Props to Kevin McCord for his post on why you should subscribe to him:

Let me give you my bottom line:

1. You are too busy to visit my website.
2. You don’t want to be frustrated when I don’t have anything new posted.
3. Subscribing will solve both of those problems.

I like that, a plain and simple reason that you should subscribe to blogs. Today, I took 45 minutes to explain the process of subscribing to RSS feeds to our staff.  I showed them the beautiful tools that Google has to offer, including:

• iGoogle - You make your Google frontpage look like you want it to and include gadgets that you want displayed.
• Google Reader - The easy way to subscribe to feeds and read them
• Google Reader Gadget for Personalized Home - Read all of your feeds without leaving your home page
• Google Blogsearch - Finding blogs of interest just got easier with Blogsearch.  Find all the important children’s ministry blogs, for example.

For the CITRT readers, this is a GREAT topic to train your staff on.  We, as uber-geeks, know how much benefit can be gained from the conversation platform that blogs provide.  Our staff aren’t typically there yet.  However, blogging is becoming more and more mainstream and less of a thing that only the geeks are doing.  Let’s get our children’s ministers, business administrators, bookkeepers, and others involved in a community of others who do the same thing they do.  I bet it’ll make a tremendous impact.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be teaching our staff how to subscribe to RSS feeds, use Google Reader, and start their own blogs. I love this video from the fine folks at CommonCraft.com about what blogs are and why everyone should have one.

I really believe that each minister in every church should, at a minimum, read blogs from others in similar ministries. However, as I’ve seen with the CITRT folks, it helps the whole when each of us write too. We all have something to offer.

So, ministers and ministerial support staff, I encourage you to start getting involved in social media.

Also, check out Aaron Marshall’s post on RSS feeds and Social Bookmarking. This is a great start for your journey.

Today I became an authorized reseller of AVG.  In doing so I am able to obtain AVG software at a dramatically discounted price, and I am able to pass most of that discount on to you.  The reseller program requires that I take some small profit from each sale.  However, by adding my reseller discount to the church/non-profit discount from AVG, you can lob off about 40% of the cost of the software.

So, to upgrade my 50-user license AVG Network Edition Anti-Virus, I would normally have to pay the retail price of $969 for two years.  Not so today - now I can offer the renewal for $581.  That’s $5.81 per machine per year!

If your church would like to share in the savings, let me know and I’ll help you get hooked up too.