Interesting section in the Chapter on blogging being done by CEOs in Naked Conversations. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who blogs for 86,000 employees behind the company firewall. I have sugested to this to a church before when there were protests about the open nature of online community, for there were cases where certain things are better kept “within the family”. OK, I said, there’s security for online community, and its much more effective than the lack of privacy that exists in “sharing during worship”, since there is no way to “filter out” people we don’t know or people we aren’t sure we can trust. There can be multiple layers of online security for blogs and forums.

(A fairly new piece of Blog/Forum software I’ve been trying out, Community Server from Telligent, has a robust array of Membership Roles and security levels, to lock down nearly every feature in the Blog/Forum/PhotoGallery tool. CS began as DotText, a dot-Net based weblog written as an open source project under Microsoft’s new open source projects (dotNetNuke is another). The developer for dotText moved on to Telligent as the lead for the CommunityServer project. CS also includes by default a Blog Home page that aggregates posts from all blogs that are opted in to be published on the blog aggregated page)

The idea of a Private internet is foreign to a lot of people. But the rise of “ExtraNets” and “INtraNets” in the business world will begin to erode this notion, as more get experience with the “Internet Efficiencies” being deployed by their companies to aid their productivity and immersion in the issues of making their companies better. Although there are different and/or additional values in the church that are at stake, there is such a thing as “Internet Efficiencies” to be realized by the church. Not in order to create some “CyberChurch”, but to bring to bear the conversational and aggregation power of Internet resources on the mission of the church.