First it was the YouTube channel,  then the Facebook page and now the Confession App – The Roman Catholic Church really is attempting to move with the times and embrace social media.

The App takes ‘sinners’ through the sacramental process of confession and asks a number of questions, including ‘have you ever wished evil on another person?’ (Have you ever heard of Jedward? Then of course I have)

It then suggests an act of contrition to absolve your sins, all with one tap of my iPhone, brilliant!

Not intended as a substitute to actually going in to church, but as a tool to encourage people to pursue their faith through the various digital technologies. It seems that even the most traditional of establishments is realising that if you want to keep in contact with your wider audience and connect with new people, it is essential to create online as well as offline engagement.

Fancy a ‘holy’ weekend? Confession: A Roman Catholic App costs £1.19  and is available from iTunes now.

Slightly late blog on this one as the event took place on Tuesday night but Hannah and I were running all over London with Jack Daniel’s in tow to give our friends at various publishing houses their first try of the new Jack Daniel’s Barbecue Sauces yesterday.

Held at the MDDA building on Portland Street the event was really my first foray into the open data field and as I don’t profess to be an expert I thought I might just share some of the links used in the meeting to demonstrate the principles and potential of open data:

A good place to start seems to be Tim Berners-Lee giving a TED talk on his view of how open data will shape the future of the internet.

If you’re partial to a nice graphic, and I certainly am, then check out this baby from the Sunlight Foundation to demonstrate how open data policies can be used by and influence society.

For me, by far the best use of open data demonstrated on Tuesday was an app called San Francisco Trees which uses data that the council already had about when and where trees had been planted, to create an iPhone app that allows users to get data on any tree they happen to be standing in front of.

The same company has created apps for finding pharmacies, doctors and postboxes but that seems a lot less fun to me.

This is an example of asking permission to use data that a public body has but doesn’t bother to share, which seems to me to be an important part of the open data movement. In a similar move the Open Election Data project is seeking to gather election data that councils hold as standard into one easy to access place.

Open data can also inspire people to gather data themselves; as in the case of open streetmap, a response to other online mapping tools not giving access to their data. Instead users have mapped large parts of the world themselves and have shared the data freely for use by the public and developers.

What struck me on Tuesday night was that even though I thought I had access to a lot of data, I don’t, at least not in a ‘useful’ form. The talk opened with the example of the Transport for London website which publishes massive amounts of information every day about tube, train and bus times. Yet this data is only accessible on the platform of the TFL’s own website. If you want to use it to compare house prices, crime rates and public transport connectivity for example, you can’t.

With lesson number on learnt I’m very much looking forward to next month’s meet up and  getting to grips with where open data can really take us.

We love our iPhones.

We love Glee.

That is all.

(review from Hannah to follow, she’s singing in the board room right now)

I’m just having a quick look at the branded app chart from Brand Republic and it looks like app downloaders are a mixed bunch.

iSimples, which allows you to play a selection of phrases from the infurating little rodent (is it a rodent?) comes in first, followed by The National Trust’s local search tool and Auto-Trader’s car buying engine.

I was one of the millions who downloaded all of these last week and the week before, along with Creme Egg (4), Facebook – many moons ago (5) and Rightmove (11). These are the ones that have stuck around, I did have the Barclaycard water slide (15) for a while but it got old quick, and also had a notable lack of any useful branding but that’s by the by.

As I said at the start these apps are pretty diverse, indicating the fact that iPhone ownership has been and still is spreading like wildfire, but they do seem to have one thing in common; they’re free.

Like the majority of users of digital tools and content iPhone users aren’t that happy to pay. I bought my first paid for app for the grand sum of 69p last week and it was a tough decision, it was sleep cycle by the way and I’m loving analysing my sleep rhythms.

Branded apps are a great way to interact with the public and even though app development can be a costly business, brands see it as a good investment to fork out for one. In the end they’re just another way to engage possible customers for your product or service and the most successful branded apps do tend to be free.

Unless of course you’re Jamie Oliver, whose $7.99 cookery app has been flying off the shelves…

If you want to be at the forefront of any subject there is no better way than to check it out online.

This week, I’ve been swotting up with Stanford University, who have utilised iTunes-U (a learning focused section on iTunes) to go one step further and produce a series of free public lectures. They focus on how to build iPhone applications and have proved incredibly popular with over one million downloads in only seven weeks.

The lectures are recorded from live classroom teachings delivered by Apple engineers. Apple currently has around 40,000 iPhone applications with new and amusing ‘apps’ being created daily.

With applications being touted as the new brand advertising – it’s no wonder the lectures have been so well received.

Yesterday Apple released a new iPod shuffle, and it talks.

No really, apparently it’s just too little to have a screen (it’s smaller than an AA battery), and this is why rather than showing you what’s playing, it tells you.

How clever is that? What I’m coming to learn though, as I become acquainted with my new MacBook, is that the whole damn operation is just clever. Not in a geeky showy-offy way either, in an actual, practical useful clever way.

Why trawl through loads of windows on your desktop when you could swing the cursor into the corner and get them to line up neatly? Why change all the settings on each of your iPhone functions separately when you could have them gathered together under one button?

When I read the stories about the new shuffle though it dawned on me that perhaps Apple are too clever for their own good. A couple of years ago I got a lovely shiny 80GB iPod classic as a present and it’s still going strong. So I’m reluctant to get an iPhone (I have a phone too you see) and I definitely don’t need a shuffle.

I’m sure there are a few people who’ll throw their old non-talking shuffle aside and rush out to buy the new one, but to the rest of us the old one’s still working fine thanks very much.

I’ve been umming and aahing about blogging on Twitter for some time now but I think that today is the day.

The main reason for this is that Twitter seems to be taking over a)The World and b) My Life. The first is manifested in all the coverage Twitter seems to be getting and the fact that Stephen Fry, who I follow, is complaining about journalists asking him about Twitter and not his new film/tv show.

The second is demonstrated by my feeling the need to Tweet whilst out for wine and tapas last night.

Last week a couple of friends asked me what this whole Twitter thing was all about and in my attempt to explain I made it sound incredibly narcissistic and quite dull. I also told them that they’d be on it in a month’s time and as addicted as me.

The great thing about Twitter is that it really should be incredibly self-involved and dull but it isn’t. It’s not just a high tech version of Heat magazine either.

Yes I now know what Stephen Fry and Boris Johnson are up to minute by minute but I also get nuggets of into on events from exhibitions to gigs going on in Manchester from @eventmatch.

It constantly evolves too, on average I’m finding a couple of new people/things to follow each day. Today’s addition is, I think, going to be particularly revolutionary as I’ve started to follow @pitchforkmedia, this means that every so often they suggest a song and I head off to blip.fm to listen to it.

Similarly I follow a couple of journalists and bloggers who point me in the direction of stuff that they’re reading or writing. Both of these demonstrate the genius of Twitter: people who know more about a particular subject than you do, be it themselves, new music or iPhones, effectively filter the internet and give you the interesting bits.