If you’re going to be in the DC area this Christmas or have friends who will be, check out the Festival of Lights. Click on one of the share buttons on the web page to invite your friends or link to it from your blogs!

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Want to store and retrieve great quotes you have? Want to find other great quotes?

A few years ago, Connor Boyack developed the website quoty.org to be able to save and tag quotes he enjoyed. You can create your own account and search through everyone else’s tags to find other quotes that may interest you.

It’s taxonomy-based, so, as an example, you can go to http://www.quoty.org/tag/faith to see quotes about faith or http://www.quoty.org/tag/prophet to see quotes about prophets. You can also use the search page to look for keywords or portions of a quote. It’s been up for a few years so it has nearly 5,000 quotes loaded up now.

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An article in the Daily Herald talks about the tweets (posts on Twitter) that were “coming fast and furious” during the recent LDS general conference.

“Even as thousands of members stuffed the LDS conference center in Salt Lake City and hundreds of thousands more watched the conference broadcast, other members were pushing the event to the forefront of social media. The search term “#ldsconf” remained among the most popular on Twitter over the weekend. Tweets flooded in, for example, when Monson spoke of the need for service.”

“They ranged from the need for the warm fuzzy jar to jabs at government. But drawing the most attention on Sunday was Elder Jeffery R. Holland, who used the majority of his time to give a direct and emotional testimony about the veracity of the church’s Book of Mormon…. The talk was followed by thousands of tweets about how powerful it was. ‘If you do anything else, watch Holland,” wrote one person.’

“But even as the church’s members streamed, tweeted, IM’d, listened and watched conference on every piece of media at their disposal, Elder Russell M. Nelson said the best kind of communication doesn’t come with a cost.

“‘Even more amazing that modern technology is our opportunity to access information directly from heaven, without hardware, software or monthly service fees,’ he said.”

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Watch this is official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.

For more information, or to join the conversation, visit mediaconvergence.economist.com.

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You are invited to participate in the second annual online LDSTech Talk hosted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 17 at 6:00 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time (MDT).

Last year, Joel Dehlin, managing director of ICS and CIO of the Church, gave a presentation and answered some of your questions via webcast. Download the inaugural online LDSTech Talk from August 2008.

We encourage you to submit questions early by filling out the LDSTech Talk Question form. Please keep questions short and concise. Use the #ldstechtalk hashtag to discuss the event on Twitter.

In addition to the opportunity of having your questions answered by Joel and a panel of Church employees, we will also present the 2009 LDSTech Awards. Please take the opportunity to nominate someone who deserves to be recognized for their efforts. There will be three categories this year:

• Helping Hand: recognizing an individual who has gone the extra mile to help and guide others within the LDSTech community
• Top Tester: recognizing an individual who has helped test and improve community development projects
• Coding Guru: recognizing an individual who has made significant code contributions on a community development project

More details are forthcoming.

Nominate someone for the LDSTech Awards.

Register for the LDSTech Talk by September 15, 2009.

Learn more about the LDS Tech Talk.

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Sony’s electronic book reader is up against the Amazon Kindle. The key to the Kindle’s success is that it is paired with the largest book store in the world, where most people likely to buy an electronic book already have accounts.

Sony fights back by using the open ePub format and pairing with Google who is offering one million public domain books in the ePub format.

With the Sony Reader you can also “check out” any ePub book from libraries, starting with the New York Public Library, for free for 21 days.

Sony’s strategy is to sell the readers, encouraging anyone to sell electronic books in the open ePub digital book format. Amazon’s strategy is the opposite: to drive sales of ebooks on Amazon. Not surprizingly, the Amazon Kindle does not support the ePub format.

Source: Sony And Google Try To Take On The Kindle With Open Books

Interestingly, seniors are the largest group of users of the Kindle. (Source: bookbusinessmag.com)

The LDS Church hasn’t yet published any content in electronic reader formats, but is preparing the entire gospel library of  scriptures, manuals, magazines, and other Church publications in XML format. Simple Web services could easily convert that XML into ePub or any other reader format. What if members with technical skills coded the conversion routines for various e-readers and they were made available on LDS.org? Then anyone could simply click on the format they wanted, and could download their favorite magazine, manual, or other materials to their e-reader at will?

How would you like to see it work? How could members help make this happen?

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By Marc Haddock
Deseret News, Friday, Aug. 21, 2009

Have you texted your teen today?

Many parents who reach out to their kids on their own technological turf may find they improve their communications, said Charles D. Knutson, a BYU computer science professor, at a Campus Education Week presentation Friday.

“I’ve had some great interaction with my kids through text messaging,” Knutson said. “This is great technology when it’s used right.”

At the same time, he warned that children in their early teens should not have unlimited access to cell phones, that teens need to be taught to use texting and chatting responsibly, and that chat rooms — where Internet users come in personal contact with strangers — should be absolutely off limits.

“We shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, but we should throw out the dirty bathwater,” he said.

Text-based messaging, such as instant messaging and cell phone texts, should take place between friends and family only.

“The most dangerous places on the Internet are places you make friends with anyone you don’t know in real life,” he said. Chat rooms that foster exactly that kind of relationship pose a risk for all ages.

But other forms of text messaging can be positive, if not carried to an extreme.

Knutson had the following advice for parents in regard to the use of text messaging:

Use social network sites that allow you to choose the friends who have access to your personal information, such as Facebook, instead of sites like MySpace, which he typified as “a seething mosh pit of youthful hormones.”

“If you feel skanky about having an account on a social network, your kid shouldn’t be there, either,” he said.

Don’t accept a “friend” on Facebook you wouldn’t invite over for dinner tonight.

Look for positive uses for cell phone texting with your children, like delivering shopping lists or sending a brief message during a meeting. He said statistics show that 68 percent of parents communicate with their teens by texting, and 56 percent say they communicate more since they began texting.

Enlist your child as a partner to eliminate unwanted contact on the Internet.

“When the child shares his or her concerns with you, then they will work with you,” Knutson said. “If you are having those kinds of interactions, you are halfway there. If they say, ‘Stay out of my space,’ then you have a problem.”

Limit access to cell phone usage for younger teens, checking out the cell phones for specific periods of time, and then expanding that time as the child gets older.

“If a kid has a cell phone when they are 13, check it out and in,” he said. “An 18-year-old has to learn to control himself, and in the process he becomes a successful adult.”

Teach your child that messaging friends while talking to you in the same room is rude.

“The technology is not evil,” Knutson said. “It’s just the next wave of technology.”

For parents concerned about Internet safety, he recommended two BYU-sponsored sites www.internetsafetypodcast.com and wiki.internetsafetypodcast.com.

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This month was the year-and-a-half birthday of the Church’s LDSTech Web site. The purpose of LDSTech is threefold:

• To communicate to the public about how technology is being used at the Church.
• To encourage community discussion, support, help, and feedback about technology and how it helps us serve in the Church.
• To collaborate with the LDSTech community on Church-sponsored technology projects.

Anyone interested in what the Church is doing with technology, where it’s heading, and being a part of it all are welcomed to visit the site. Those interested may include:

• Clerks, Stake Technology Specialists, and others, who can share experiences, offer advice, ask questions, and discuss issues that arise in the course of their work.
• Those who want to put their skills to use can help in the collaboration of community development projects available. All you have to do is agree to and submit the Individual Contributors License, obtain an LDS Account, and dig into the LDSTech Wiki.
• Anyone who likes to discuss technology and the many ways we can utilize it to benefit those serving in the Church will enjoy the LDSTech Forum.
• Those interested in learning about what technologies the Church is working on will enjoy the bi-weekly featured articles by technical employees.

There are a lot of exciting things going on at LDSTech:

• There are currently nine technical projects that you can help with. They recently added a project to create a Mormon Channel iPhone Application and a Recreation Properties Web application.
• LDSTech is on Twitter! You can follow LDSTech and get updated on new featured articles, opportunities to help with projects, technical job openings, and hot topics in the forums.
• A new series will be running called Mormons in Technology which will spotlight members of the Church and how they have made a difference in technology.

LDSTech is more than just a Web site. They interact with the members of the community daily and are paving the way for more collaboration between the Church organization and its members.

We hope you’ll participate and share your great ideas!

Be sure to register for the 2nd annual online LDSTech Talk on September 17 at 6:00 p.m. MDT. Submit questions early by filling out the LDSTech Talk Question form. Learn more about the LDS Tech Talk.

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A recent article in USA Today titled “Txting away ur education” talked about the use of cell phones and texting in our schools and the distraction that can be to your child’s education. It also talked about how addicted some youth are to texting and the emotional impact it has on them. I encourage you to read the article to be informed about the issues.

A Nielsen study reports that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the 4th quarter of 2008 — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier. Read more about the extent of text messaging. 

How many messages do your children send? Are those during school time? Are they during sleep time? Have you had a good discussion with your children, taught them to be responsible in using their cell phones, and set ground rules with them?

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Last month, I wrote “Faith-Promoting Story or Urban Legend?” I just found this video clip, which debunks a few other Mormon myths.

And, of course, there is this video produced by the Church Public Affairs Department:

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