There has been great interest in Pope Benedict XVI’s recent use of online social media.  He is now encouraging priests to become part of the mainstream online culture by blogging and being present through a variety of online tools. Please the following article for more information:

and add your comments at the bottom of this post to join in the conversation on this interesting topic:

http://mashable.com/2010/01/24/pope-priests-blog/

Does your mountain-area church have a website?  We have the resources to help churches of all denominations serving mountain communities everywhere to not only create sites, but to build online communities, with multimedia, forums, interactive content, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, and much more at absolutely no cost.  Imagine having a dynamic site online where church news are updated, where parishioners can post text and video comments as well as become “friends” with others and participate in online communities, and where religious leaders can e-mail and connect to all their members online, via our blogging service here, or via their smart phones.

Welcome visitors and members of MountainSites.info, a free site-creation and site-hosting service for clubs, organizations, businesses, and churches serving mountain communities.

Social-media is a buzz word that many businesses and organizations need to become more aware of.  In short, through your organization’s or business’ social connections  or lack thereof, you can face success or failure in the short or long run. What can a business do without customers? What can organizations do without members?

Here’s a video on online social media that may serve as an introduction or as a refresher:

Now, imagine that with each post you write here, your same post can appear on Twitter, where numerous potential members or customers have access to it. As they click on your Twitter post, they land on your MountainSites.info site, and can learn more about your organization or business, and contact you.

Twitter is not a fly-by-night phenomenon and it can surely bring in more traffic to your site, more members to your club, organization, or church, and more customers to your business.  We’ll feature additional how-to guides on using the free Twitter plugin that comes with your free mountain site in an upcoming post.  For now, here is a link to a helpful article on Twitter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

To preview more of the functionality of our Twitter plugin when connected to a free Twitter account, please check out our Twitter Site and follow us:

http://twitter.com/mountainwebtool

Thank you for reading this post and please leave a text or video comment below and share your thoughts about the potential of online-social marketing for remote mountain communities.

Elvis Sersea, Webmaster/Founder

Welcome and thank you for visiting,

Once you have a site with us, you can quickly and easily customize it to change the title, add posts with multimedia content, and add a variety of other social networking tools. Here’s a video embed, a social media for business history lesson video from Google, which took a simple copy, click of the button, and paste to do:

You can easily and automatically share your posts between Twitter and this site, as well as add posts from your cellphones.

Some of our other plugins here allow you to make money, yes, make money using a free site hosted by us, by adding advertising, as well as creating your very own E-Store with a Paypal account (learn more and create a free Paypal account by visiting http://Paypal.com )
Best of all, you can advertise your club, organization, business, or church here, and create an online networking site with groups and forums site for your customers and members to ask questions, post comments, in short, to communicate and collaborate with you online as well. By creating a free site with us you’re reaching out to your community, your customers.

MountainSites.info is here to stay and will never charge you for a free blog created with us. You’re encouraged to use our Skype Feature to call us or leave a voice message. (Yes, you can add this same Skype communication feature on your own sites as well. )

Thank you,

Elvis Sersea, Webmaster and Founder

We’ve been offering free forum and blog hosting for the past year and a half on numerous sites. In each case and for each hosting site we believed, and still do, that it was a worthwhile cause to offer this free service. While financially our business-model is a failure (we earn less than 5% each month from the advertising posted on our sites compared to the costs incurred for our server hosting, management, and programmer, not mentioning the numerous hours spent by us to manage, design, assist members, and add to the sites) we look forward to a day when online publishing platforms such as the WPMU blog system here at MountainSites.info, are everyman’s cost-free online publishing and collaboration platforms for family and friends, as well as for work and play.

As a public school teacher I have seen first hand the positive empowerment and engagement resulting from students’ academic use of online tools, and as an online school teacher and administrator I can mention some of the studies that show that close to 50% of U.S. public school students will attend some form of online courses by 2019. Whether we use online publishing platforms to communicate,to learn, to teach, to share advice, to shop, sell, or purchase goods, to advertise our businesses or services, or to stay in touch with family members, friends, acquaintances, or colleagues, this trend is here to stay.

Sadly, there are numerous “dubious characters” on the internet who try to disrupt sites, or make a quick buck without regard of their actions. Such individuals may promise companies instant fame on the internet by bombarding free blog and forum hosting such as ours with “keyword-rich” advertising of various business without regard of the context of the online community they’re spamming. Wikipedia has some helpful information about spam and splogs as well (click on the links to access this).

In our case, we’ve received more than 15 spam blogs on this site alone in the last 24 hours. We manually deleted the splogs and identified the members who have created them as “spammers” and took additional actions to deny them future access.

We currently have and use several powerful plugins which work as tools to combat comment spams and will discuss them further in our “Featured Plugins” posts category.

To learn more about the pervasive issue of splogs and comment spam and how blog owners are dealing with this here’s an online conversation that may shed further light into the problem: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/12496

Rest assured that we will remain diligent in combating spam and splogs. Should you come across something that resembles a spam or splog on our site, please let us know so that we can “take a look.”
We welcome your questions on this topic as well as constructive comments bellow.

Thank you,
Elvis aka MaestroSersea, MountainSites.info Founder and Webmaster