3 Reasons Google Blogs, And Why Your Church Should Too

Despite all the worries I have about Google going evil, I am still an avid user. I get my news from RSS feeds and News.Google.com. I even have a large list of searches that Google sends to my gmail account via Google Alerts. So, when I heard that Google News has a blog of its own I checked it out and I liked the first post enough to comment on it.

I like their list of reasons for doing a blog, and I am going to add this into my arguments for better usage of blogs in the church.

1. They don’t issue many press releases. They don’t have too. The people that Google wants to inform are already looking for the information. The same goes for your church. Believe me, the people at your church want information; and if they don’t get information they will either miss out on something meant for them or gripe about how nobody knowing what’s going on.
2. They don’t want to fill your inbox. I can’t stand mailing lists from companies and organizations. The information tends to feel more self serving than informational. Even if I do subscribe to a list I tend to skip over them when I am doing my first trip through the inbox and then a few days later I delete them figuring them to be out of date. E-Mail is outdated, it is unpredictable, and troublesome.
3. A blog is more direct and informal. Not every piece of news is mail worthy, and much of it isn’t even email worthy. Yet, there is a lot of that news which people would be interested in knowing. It is the type of news that builds familiarity.

I would also like to tack on another point about that 3rd point. If the church sends you an email with something good in it and you want to share it with a friend then the best way to do that is to go back to your computer and forward the email to them. There are problems with that.

1. Forwarded emails, which are not properly reformat, are horrible. Especially if you were crazy enough to send it in html (html email is a detestable chimera).
2. You have to go back to your computer to do it. Chances are I will forget, suddenly consider whether the person really wanted me to bug them with an email, or procrastinate on it until it is too late. It is better to just say “Hey, check out the news blog at TheChurchIMentioned.com/news, it should still be on the first page.”
3. Give a man a fish and he will feed for a day, give a man a feed and he will fish for your news. With regard to that last sentence, I apologize. A blog/news site makes it easy for people to connect with what is going on. They can hear the heartbeat of your ministry from the comfort of their own keyboard.

For the record, I have subscribed to the Google News Blog in my Sage live bookmark feeds. I’ll see how it goes, and if I decide that I don’t want to keep up with their information on my schedule then I will delete the link and not worry about it again.