cow tipping: wrestling with youth ministry

Can you copyright your ideas on your blog?

So I am going to start posting ideas about my writing project. I'm not sure if it is worth stealing, but I want to know how I can protect my ideas and not have someone take off with my thoughts for thier own best selling book. Does anyone out there know how I can protect them?

Over at the Lost Art of Blogging, they suggest writing a special copyright page. It may be a good idea to make a all new blog page, in which you’ll write all sorts of copyright related stuff and various rules, like what people are allowed to do with your content, what they’re not allowed to and the consequences of disobeying them. Hopefully this will both educate people on what they can do with someone else’s content and discourage plagiarizers.A great example of this can be found at Dosh Dosh.

I'm #5!

I just came in at #5 on the Top 10 Para-Church Youth Ministers.

Actually the list is the hilarious creation of Balliver Jones. Someone had to make fun of the goof-balls over at the Church Report. This is the "real" List of the Top 20 Youth Pastors. I'm sure their crack team of researchers really racked their brains to formulate the results.

In closing, I would just like to say to #6 Sean Meade, #7 John Wilson, and #8 Jason Raitz...

...eat it, I'm #5!

Balliver Jones: The Thomas Pynchon of the blogging world

First, let me just say that I am a huge fan of über-blogger Balliver Jones - the Thomas Pynchon of the blogging world. Jones is known for his avoidance of personal publicity: very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1980s.

Anyway, he had an excellent post today and clued his readers into a great new website: Watching Grass Grow. Thanks Balliver!

New Look, New Address

Since I am committing to give myself a new look this year, I thought I would give my blog a new look as well. I've done a little redecorating and given the site a new address. I bought the domain names www.cow-tipping.com and www.cow-tipping.org. I thought I would buy both domains so some porn site doesn't try to steal my web traffic.

Why cow-tipping?
Well, when I got to my current church the middle school ministry was called Cloud of Witnesses (Hebrews 12:1-3). It's a great passage (especially in the Message) and works great for a youth group. However, the students never latched on to it, so they just called it COW. Being the arrogant punk that I am I thought it would be fun to write a blog that attempts to critique youth ministry and church. I do have to say that I have resolved to do less critiquing this year and more celebrating of this amazing calling. A good friend recently encouraged me to quit blogging about how old people need to get out of the way so we young people can be the future of youth ministry. Well now that I'm 33 - which is right in the middle of young punk and old fart - and I'm tired of complaining. I just want to have fun being a middle school pastor and enjoy my partners in ministry (you know who you are)!

Tech Help

I just bought a few domain names at www.godaddy.com and I want to "connect" them to my blog. You know what I mean? So instead of typing www.cloudofwitnesses.blogs.com people can just use my new (secret) domain names.

How does that work?