Duped by TEC Communicators
Out here away from Disneyland, many of us had been waiting for the HoD's "special order" session this evening, in which "conversation about B033" had been promised. We were told the House of Deputies would have a session in which there would be conversation about resolution B033, which was passed in the 2006 General Convention.
I organized my evening so I could watch that session.
Supposedly, it would be webcast on the highly touted GC Media Hub. I went there, but that site continues to be virtually useless for live webcasts. I've never even been able to get the page to load properly ... even on a T1 connection. Finally, I resorted to Baby Blue's site to catch amateur video of it. Pity when we have to go to our Worthy Opponents to get timely news about our own church.
I have pretty good connectivity – with a T1 line at work and high-speed DSL at home – and I’m a fairly savvy user of websites. From my attempted use, the MediaHub thing looks like a raving failure so far.
I hit “refresh” time after time, but the whole page would never load properly.
And these are the "communicators" who promise to lead us into a brave new world??? I think not.
Remember, these are the people who have proposed to kill our print publications because the Web is going to be oh-so-glorious and we can trust them to make it so.
If I, a highly motivated “consumer” of their Web product this week, can’t even get their website to work for me, then what does that say for the future of the site? I was so highly motivated that I was willing to hit “refresh” time after time after time, hoping the darn page would load correctly. Do you believe a mere “inquirer” would have that much patience. I don’t.
On this experience alone, I would urge our Bishops and Deputies to say a resounding “NO!” to their proposal. If the folks currently in charge of TEC communications can’t even make a tricycle work, I am not ready to give them a whole new platform for TEC communications.
I organized my evening so I could watch that session.
Supposedly, it would be webcast on the highly touted GC Media Hub. I went there, but that site continues to be virtually useless for live webcasts. I've never even been able to get the page to load properly ... even on a T1 connection. Finally, I resorted to Baby Blue's site to catch amateur video of it. Pity when we have to go to our Worthy Opponents to get timely news about our own church.
I have pretty good connectivity – with a T1 line at work and high-speed DSL at home – and I’m a fairly savvy user of websites. From my attempted use, the MediaHub thing looks like a raving failure so far.
I hit “refresh” time after time, but the whole page would never load properly.
And these are the "communicators" who promise to lead us into a brave new world??? I think not.
Remember, these are the people who have proposed to kill our print publications because the Web is going to be oh-so-glorious and we can trust them to make it so.
If I, a highly motivated “consumer” of their Web product this week, can’t even get their website to work for me, then what does that say for the future of the site? I was so highly motivated that I was willing to hit “refresh” time after time after time, hoping the darn page would load correctly. Do you believe a mere “inquirer” would have that much patience. I don’t.
On this experience alone, I would urge our Bishops and Deputies to say a resounding “NO!” to their proposal. If the folks currently in charge of TEC communications can’t even make a tricycle work, I am not ready to give them a whole new platform for TEC communications.
posted by Lisa Fox at 7/10/2009 12:48:00 AM
9 Comments:
Eeek.
I'm sad to say it worked really well for me, in Australia, Lisa!
Not that I'm the target user, so this is of little comfort, I suspect!
Col
I'm glad it worked well for someone, Colin.
Huh, weird. The hub was way slow--I had to load it in the background while doing other things (I'm also on a T1 line), but it worked for me. Mind you, I was not watching live video but only the "on demand" stuff. Maybe it was the live streaming that caused a problem?
I think the main problem with the hub is that it is non informative. It's splashy, but I'm getting much more info from the various blogs and essays people are writing about the doin's, than I get from twitter feeds and headlines.
It worked for me, on a ridiculous fast university connection, but it was kind of pointless since it spent 1/2 hour showing people talking to each other with nothing I could hear.
The page is really badly designed and slows down even my fast connection and fast computer. I don't get the point of the little headline scroll on the left inset window since hitting "more" just reloads the same page.
This would be hopeless if I were trying it from home, where we have a decent speed cable connection.
I'm finding some of the most useful information comes from the tweets and I am following the twubs sites
http://twubs.com/ecgc and http://twubs.com/integrityusa
I have to agree that the hub is a huge resource hog. And, also agree that the worst thing is that for all the CPU degredation and bandwidth use - what is shown is not very informative.
JTurner, I don't have a problem with the "on-demand" videos; it's the live streams that don't work and often crash my browser.
I observe that James, over at the Three Legged Stool, has now posted this notice on his link to the GCHub: "WARNING - keeps crashing my browser when the site is working the site simply isn't working properly."
And ditto to what you all are saying. It's a resource hog with little actual information. I'd love to see a summary of what meetings are happening, which are upcoming, when the next livestream or media briefing will be, etc. Instead, it's kinda "all hat and no cows."
Glad I discovered your blog from a link at The Lead.
GCMediaHub sucks big time. I miss the daily briefings from the Columbus, OH GC back in 2006.
I echo the comments about the on demand stuff. Today was a little better though.
- Jay Vos
Glad to have you here, Jay.
My experience with the GC Media Hub has not gotten better over this week. One would hope they would make improvements, but they have not ... as far as I can tell.
In any other organization, heads would roll. But apparently, TEC is happy to have a dysfunctional website. Go figure!
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