I am pleased to announce a new LDS Blog Portal focusing on mainstream and orthodox LDS blogs and bloggers:
I will now conclude my critical look at LDS Blog Portals (see Parts 1 , 2 , 3 ).
The most popular of LDS Blog Portals, LDSBLogs.org, is primarily an exercise in self-promotion. In my opinion its claims to promote the church are trumped by its desire to promote itself. This orientation is reflected in the technology itself. It favors blogs by those who are friends or who promote ideas friendly to the fringe mormonism of Dialogue and Sunstone magazines. While they try to walk a line, the conversations featured are often overly and publicly critical of the church and her divinely appointed authorities. While they may lay claim to the name “faithful,” the kind of murmuring that often goes on is not good.
Continuing my series on LDS Blog Portals from Part 1 and Part 2 .
In the previous post I discussed some of the history of LDS Blog portals and how the motivations of those creating the portals played into their design and discussed to some extent how those motivation ultimately affected how the portals are run. Be sure to check out the clarifying comments by the creators of LDSblogs.org on the previous two posts.
Now I would like to look a little at how the self-promotion marketing objective of the portal design has affected usability and technology.
Continued from Part 1: Never Show Your Face Anywhere in the Bloggernacle Ever Again
Blogging itself is still a new technology, and many people are only now becoming aware of LDS Blogs. By its nature, blogging is focused on the present. Things that were posted two or three years ago are ancient history in blog-time. So it is not surprising that the origin of LDS Blog portals is not well known.
The first LDS Blog portal that I remember was Planet LDS. Created by John Hesch and hosted by KZION Radio, originally, Planet LDS ran on the popular python blog aggregation software Planet from which its name was derived. It has since been migrated to run on the popular PHP blog platform Wordpress . I remember visiting Planet LDS as early as 2004 when I first became involved with LDS Blogging and it has been in continual operation since then. While it gets little attention these days when people speak of LDS Blogs, Planet LDS Pioneered the LDS Blog portal concept, paving the way for what was to come.
Last week, after some unfortunately contentious conversations related to my previous blog post, I was unexpectedly delisted from the largest LDS blog portal there is.
The LDS Church Newsroom is highlighting a speech given by Elder Russel M. Ballard, one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, at the graduation ceremony of BYU-Hawaii on Friday, December 15th, in which he encouraged students to embrace the “New Media,” including blogging, as a way to share the gospel and support the kingdom.
You can read the full text of the speech:
Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church
This is very exciting news! Blogging is a wonderful tool for all the reasons Elder Ballard enumerates and I hope to see increasing numbers of faithful Latter-day Saints blogging about the gospel.
However, to all of you who are just beginning to discover and explore Mormon blogs, I feel compelled to post a Caveat Lector:
Elder Ballard endorsed LDS Blogging, but he did not necessarily endorse the existing LDS Blogging community known as “The Bloggernacle.”
For some months now, brother Michael Otterson, who is the media relations director for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been participating as a blogger on the Washington Post / Newsweek religious blog On Faith . Each week or so the blog hosts pose a question to the panelists, who represent various religious and spiritual groups, and each has the opportunity to post an answer from the point of view of their faith.
Sister Kathleen Flake, who is a professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University, has now joined the blog as well as a second Latter-day Saint.
I realize that I haven’t posted any new material since the beginning of February, and I apologize. I have a whole list of topics that I have been meaning to write about, but with a new baby, a difficult post-delivery recovery for my wife, the worst cold-season we have had, and increased work load, I think an unexpected hiatus from blogging was appropriate. Family needs have to come first.
I often run across articles, videos, and websites that I would like to blog about but don’t have the time to compose a post around. I hate that I build up an ever expanding collection of links that I intend to blog about but never seem to find as much time to do it as I would like.
Now, thanks to the marvelous Google Reader, I have a solution. I now have a new section near the top of the sidebar of SixteenSmallStones.org labeled “Recommended Links” that will display the five most recent headlines that I have marked to share in my Google Reader.
Yesterday was the first anniversary of my first post on Sixteen Small Stones! I have now blogged here longer than any of my previous blogging endeavors. I offer a big “Thank You” to those of you who are kind enough to read, and especially to those of you who have left feedback, whether as comments on the website or as private email to me.
To celebrate, I have compiled a list of some of my favorite posts from this first year. If you have started reading recently, you may want to check them out:
Neglected Literature: Flatland
The Christmas Tree
Sunset Clauses, Bureacronyms, and the Patriot Act
Garfield Reloaded
La historia peculiar de Orélie Antoine de Tounens
The Great Seal of the United States
A Small Child’s Prayer
The Consistency of the LDS Church’s Position Regarding Legislating Marriage
An LDS Lexicon: Endue, Endow, Endowment
More on Superchastity or Extra-Abstinence
My life never seems to slow down for even a week at a time, and since the week before the election, I have had to take a break from blogging to tend to more substantial concerns. It is tiring, but I like to think that I “can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run” as Rudyard Kipling described it in his poem “If.” Even when it is exhausting, I enjoy every minute.
Fear not, I have plenty of of thoughts, themes, and projects churning that will soon find their way out here.
I have been performing puppetry with my troupe, Maxed Out Puppetry, for about eight years now. We perform fairly frequently at various venues in Utah county, and periodically in the Salt Lake valley. This Friday, September 1st, we will be performing for at the acclaimed Timpanogos Storytelling Festival at 5:30pm for about 45 minutes.
In order to help those interested, I’ve added an embedded Google Calendar to the blog sidebar on the right that displays upcoming events where I will be performing with my troupe.
For those of you who have not yet discovered, or don’t care to discover the wonders of Feeds and Feed Readers, I have added an email subscription service near the top of the sidebar to help you to effortlessly stay aware of new content on Sixteen Small Stones.
Brother Larry Richman is the director of the Internet Coordination Group for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has started a blog called ldsWebguy. While not officially sponsored by the church, if you want some insight into how the church is using the Internet, and even more importantly, if you want to learn about what you can do to use the Internet to help build the kingdom, go check it out.
I apologize for the recent lack of posts.
The last week of June I was working extra hours (most days until 4:30 in the morning) to get the web-based application we have been writing at work for the last 8 months finished and released by July 3rd. I worked Sunday July 2nd from 2:00 in the afternoon straight through to 7:30 the next morning. It was exhausting, but we did get the beast into production.
I then took vacation from July 3rd through the 7th to decompress and spend time with my family.
