Unexpected changes at my employment, and in our family, prevented me from pursuing further feature developments as I had planned.  But things are finally moving along now.

With Nothing Wavering I always wanted to attempt more transparency and community feedback than is available at most other LDS blog portals.  Finally, I am pleased to announce the new Nothing Wavering Blog where you can keep up with new features and blogs being added to the portal, as well as give your feedback.  Please consider subscribing to the blog’s RSS Feed or Email List to to keep up with what is happening with the portal, since I will not be discussing it much here at Sixteen Small Stones.

New features already announced include the ability to follow Nothing Wavering content with Twitter, a new Nothing Wavering Facebook Group, and plans for a Nothing Wavering Podcast using technology that allows listeners to easily record their own questions, comments, and topic suggestions over the phone to be included in the next episode of the Podcast.

There is also now a Nothing Wavering banner image that blogs included on the portal, as well as anyone else who wants to, can add to their websites to help promote the site.

It should be a fun and interesting endeavor for 2009.  I will continue to blog here as well, but  to keep up with future developments, as well as participate in its direction, please join me over at the Nothing Wavering blog.

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.

The administrators of LDSBlogs.org are happy to point to alternatives like LDSElect, Blogregate, and Mormon Blogosphere. However, all of these portals are equally, or more friendly to the fringes of Mormonism than LDSBlogs.org and all of them to some extent have mirrored the technological consequences of the self-serving goals of LDSBlogs.org. This allows LDSBlogs.org to maintain the illusion of being in the mainstream. While they tolerate a great deal of murmuring and criticism of the Brethren, ironically criticism of the bloggernacle clique itself is not welcome. This alienates orthodox, mainstream members who are frustrated by what I have named “The Murmurnacle.”

I submit that the hierarchical methods of LDSBlogs.org are contrary to the spirit of Zion. Blogs are distinguished by ranks according to their chances for learning , and by their connections to the administrators of the portal. Ironically, these very problems are often criticized by those involved with LDSBlogs.org when they are found elsewhere in society, government, and even perceived by them in the church. And yet they hypocritically employ the same measures in their own self promotion and the promotion of the more liberal type of Mormonism many to which many of them subscribe.

In the Book of Mormon, Nephi writes:

…for, behold, priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion.
(2 Nephi chapter 26, verse 29)

I think that all LDS blogging has the inherent danger of transforming into priestcraft, including my own. It is easy to slip from seeking the welfare of Zion to seeking the praise of the world, especially in the internet age, where anyone who puts forth an effort can try to gather an audience and convert a following. I will not go so far as to label the LDSBlogs.org project priestcraft. But the admitted marketing, self-promotional purpose, and the self-serving promotion of some blogs above the others that has been the driving force at LDSBlogs.org is, in my opinion, like unto the spirit of priestcraft, even if it does not amount to equality.

And criticism of the bloggernacle clique itself leads to ridicule and blacklisting. Orthodox members find themselves marginalized by the “popular” crowd—which ironically ends up being a familiar scenario for orthodox members. Mainstream, orthodox members who are interested in blogging, but are uncomfortable with the murmuring, and who want to support the Brethren, find themselves with nowhere else to turn.

So what is to be done?

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.

As covered by the previous post, the creators of LDSblogs.org designed their portal as a way to promote themselves in competition to bigger group blogs. This motivation lead to a hierarchical layout that lends itself to using page position to promote or demote certain people or points of view. Interestingly, even after the portal creators had achieved the prominence that was the goal of their project, the layout of the site has not been modified. The box designations as “Big Islands,” “Isles of the Sean,” “Atolls,” etc are practically incoherent, but at some level are perhaps indications of web traffic or post volume.

Most of the subsequent LDS Blog portals have started in reaction to an injustice (perceived or real) that results from the promotional system at LDSBlogs.org, but ironically, every one of the other portals mimicked the hierarchical layout from which the injustice derived, albeit with their own interesting variations.

LDSElect.org kept the layout, however, it did introduce the ability to individually configure which blogs are displayed in which box. This was a helpful step toward equity for frequent users, but the default listing still promoted certain blogs over others, and there is some reason to wonder how many users bother to change the default.

Blogregate at Mormonblogs.org also copied the hierarchical layout of LDSBlogs.org, but with the twist that the boxes represented different topics rather than arbitrary designations of preference. However, in this case the hierarchy was topical, and so Feminism and Technology received preferred status over the rest.

Mormon Blogosphere adopted the same hierachy, but the categories, when taken at face value, are as incoherent and arbitrary as the islands designation of LDSBlogs.org. And because the categories are more numerous, and the content more cluttered, the site is hard to use.

This hierarchical layout appears to have been originally designed, in the spirit of self promotion, to keep the posts of the founders of LDSBlogs.org constantly at the page top, above the fold (a fact that none of the commentators disputed in the previous post). But that decision makes for an awkward usability problem. The founders, who, save a few, are busy posting at By Common Consent, post fairly infrequently. This means that in order to find fresh content, regular visitors have to move from box to box to see if there is anything new. This is both tedious and unnecessary. Users shouldn’t have to search for new content. It should be obvious and prominent.

Another effect of the self-promotion design of the portal is the lack of modern distributed content, like RSS Feeds, email subscriptions, or embeddable widgets. RSS and distributed content is the driving force behind nearly all web-based technology trends. Because their self promotion depends on the layout positioning of their blogs on their website, the goal is to attract as much traffic to the website itself, not to distribute the content elsewhere. This is a very technologically backward system. But RSS Feeds and Email subscriptions promote new content first, so it is contrary to their prime directive. And embeddable widgets send the content elsewhere where no one will see their content first. The only imitator to rectify this problem is mormonblogs.org, which provides RSS Feeds of new content in each topical box. The original Planet LDS portal had an aggregated RSS feed as well. Ironically, blog portals depend on distributed content technologies, specifically RSS, to function at all. So using other’s RSS feeds to bring value to your site without providing an RSS Feed seems rather self-serving and inequitable.

While there have been slight improvements to the technology employed by LDS Blog aggregators, other than the initial improvement introduced by LDSBlogs.org and since copied by the rest, as well as comment aggregation and LDSElect.org’s creative individualized customization, there has been little innovation. While the number of blogs has increased, the features offered have remained essentially static. Meanwhile, web technologies related to blogging, podcasting, and distributed content have exploded. This lack of innovation is probably partially because if the self promotional nature of the LDSBlog.org portal. Their goal was to market themselves, and since that goal had been met, there was little motivation to expand. Had their goal been to promote the church, or to promote lds blogs in general, there are numerous avenues of innovation that might have been explored. The lack of innovation is also probably due to the lack of technical ability among the founders of the Archipelago.

Since the advent of LDS Blog Portals, the official church websites have added numerous RSS Feeds. If the portals were interested in building up the church, and not just themselves, they would find ways to incorporate and promote official church content.

Another technological problem of the portals, is that the portal links are only temporary. Because links disappear as they are eventually replaced by newer content, the links do nothing to improve the search engine ranking of the included blogs. Google uses incoming links to help calculate how high a website should appear in search results. But those links need to be permanently discoverable to accumulate in search engine stats. If LDSBlog portals were truly interested in improving the visibility of faithful LDS content on Google, they would be aware of search engine optimization and attempt to use their popularity to help the church in this regard. Instead they encourage included blogs to place banner links back to the portal, which improves the Google standing of the portal in searches for LDS blogs, but doesn’t help the actual content they are aggregating achieve higher, long-term visibility.

In my next post I will conclude my Critical Look at LDS Blog Portals.

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.

January 2005 was a time of major growth for LDS Blogging. The number of LDS blogs had been rapidly increasing throughout 2004, and larger group blogs were beginning to dominate a good deal of the traffic and LDS Blog readership. Getting added to the blogroll, or list of LDS blogs, in the sidebar of one of the large group blogs was the best way for smaller LDS blogs to attract traffic.

Looking to compete for readers with these larger blogs, a small group of solo LDS bloggers formed a coalition for mutual promotion that they called “The Mormon Archipelago.”

It was first announced by J. Stapley at his blog Splendid Sun:

”…I’m very pleased to announce the birth of the Mormon Archipelago. [...] In order to continually add value to your blogging experience, a group of high quality blogs have joined forces in a Commonwealth, as it were. If you want to shop at Wal-Mart or Target, that is fine (I enjoy it myself on ocassion), but sometimes you need something more intimate and refined.”
“Besides the cool logo and grouped links, we are working on a consolidated RSS feeds for our Menus and for your syndicating pleasure. You can look forward to guest blogging, and wonders that have yet to be revealed to the children of men.”

Ronan made a similar announcement at his blog, United Brethren, entitled Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Both Stapley and Ronan employed the Walmart vs Local store metaphor and both hinted at “secret” other things in the works as part of their efforts to compete. In a comment on his post, J. Stapley also clarified the motivation and vision of the Archipelago:

“It is essentially a loose association of blogs. So, it is really blogs that are members, not individuals. The ways of the Archipelago are indeed mysterious…yet, as I mentioned, there are marketing and collaborative initiatives that are in the works. But these are just the initial fruits of the harvest…”

Shortly thereafter, Geoff Johnston announced that his New Cool Thang blog had joined the coalition and hinted at what was to come:

“In the meantime we’ll have to live without recent comments and the other goodies… I know, you’re thinking Give me convenience, or give me death! I’ll see what I can do for you (the convenience part, that is).”

The purpose of the Archipelago was essentially a collaborative “marketing” initiative by a small group of solo LDS bloggers to boost their own traffic and readership.

The “secret” “wonder” of “convenience” that they all hinted at would be announced a month later by Geoff in an post alluding to the his previous announcement entitled Give me convenience or give me death.

”…the new home page for the Mormon Archipelago: www.ldsblogs.org Go check it out and let me know what you think!”
“The purpose of the new site is to be a useful central place to see what’s going on at all of the best blogs in the Bloggernacle. We hope it will continue to grow more useful over time.”

And so LDSBlogs.org was born.

Behind the stated purpose of the portal, to create a convenient LDS Blog portal, was the motivating purpose of driving traffic toward their own specific blogs. So while convenient general promotion was a partial motivation, the site was essentially a vehicle for self promotion.

This essential marketing motivation was demontrated, not only by their previous statements as they formed the Archipelago coalition, but also by the placement of their blog content on the portal. The archipelago grouped blogs into sections they call “islands.” The islands placed at the top of the portal page would be perpetually displayed in the prime web page real estate, above the fold, so it would naturally get the most attention. The founders of the archipelago placed two islands at the top, one containing their own blog posts, and a second containing the aggregated blog posts of the more popular group blogs. It was marketing by visual proximity. People would visit the portal to conveniently keep up with the latest content from the more popular LDS blogs, and at the same time would see the most recent posts from the archipelago blogs.

By segmenting and grouping blogs, they also ensured that their post titles would not be pushed down off of the page by newer content from other blogs.

From a usability point of view, the portal was superior to the older Planet LDS portal. By eliminating the content from the new content display and only showing the post title, author, and source blog, the aggregator was much cleaner to lay out and more content was available at a glance.

LDSBlogs.org was written by Geoff Johnston’s brother Russ. It is a custom web application built using PHP. Russ has since released the code as open source software project called Blogroll Z . It is also the software used by the Utah Bloghive portal for Utah Politic blogs.

After nearly a year of building traffic, the founders of LDSBlogs.org suddenly decided to de-list the most popular of the LDS Group Blogs, Times and Seasons, and then after a bit of debate relist it in one of the lower island boxes. They introduced a policy that “blogs with top-box status” had to display the Archipelago logo and link on their own blog in a location above the fold where it would be seen by all visitors. Again, the essential marketing purpose of the portal is clear. Times and Seasons had been slow to promote the Archipelago and the coalition wanted the greater access to the large T&S readership that a link and logo above the fold would provide. The controversy was soon over, but the marketing foundation of the Archipelago was clearly on display.

LDSBlogs.org quickly became the “gateway to the bloggernacle” and their decisions to include or exclude would have a huge influence over the visibility, discoverabilty, and readership of all but the most popular LDS Blogs. Because of the marketing roots of the project, the segmented layout of the portal leant itself to favoritism of some blogs and by extension some approaches to Mormonism over others. Blogs and Mormon perspectives that they favored were moved into more prominent positions. Less favored blogs were pushed farther down. Blogs could be marginalized by exclusion or given unnatural attention by inclusion.

This tendency to favoritism was most recently on display with the addition of the Juvenile Instructor blog. Even though he is not an active participant and has no official, obvious connection to the Juvenile Instructor, the blog is hosted on the hosting account of Archipelago founder J. Stapley, who likely helped them build their blog. (J. is credited with the blog designs of both LDSBlogs.org as well as Feminist Mormon Housewives.) Not surprisingly, the Juvenile Instructor was soon adopted into the Archipelago island above the fold where it enjoys prominence above older, more established blogs as well as newcomers like Thinking in A Marrow Bone that should be equal to it, located in the bottom box.

By mid-2005 I had already removed myself from active participation in the Bloggernacle, so the development of the competing aggregator, LDSElect.org , is less clear to me. David Landrith apparently created the LDS Elect portal as a response to the problems of marginalization of blogs by the Archipelago portal. His portal allowed readers to customize which blogs would be displayed in which groups. Readers would move their preferred blogs to the top boxes and less interesting blogs to lower boxes. LDSElect was also more open to including blogs even farther outside of mainstream, orthodox Mormonism that LDSblogs.org excluded. As a result, his portal gained popularity among those promoting an even more fringe view than the Archipelago. Landrith originally created his portal based on the WordPress blogging platform, but appears to have since rewritten it as a custom application in PHP.

The marketing initiative of the original founders of LDSBlogs.org was successful in an unexpected way. Each of them became a prominent personality throughout the bloggernacle, and their opinions and posts received greater weight. Throughout 2006, 2007, and 2008, six out of the nine original founders were invited and accepted positions as bloggers for By Common Consent. In many ways they sold out their original desire to compete with the “Walmart” blogs and were happily acquired by the Empire they sought to resist. After all, their original goal was to promote their own content, and an offer to join a big group blog with the traffic of By Common Consent accomplishes that goal, though not in the way that their original Archipelago initiative might have envisioned.

With six out of the nine founders of LDSBlogs.org now permanent contributors, LDSBlogs.org has evolved to some extent into the marketing arm of By Common Consent. Blogs that are more in line with the Liberal Mormonism promoted there are given greater prominence on the portal. Blogs that oppose their more liberal view of Mormonism are pushed down into more obscure boxes, or like my blog, may be excluded altogether. Blogs that promote even more liberal forms for Mormonism, like the Sunstone blog, are also often de-listed.

A number of other portals have sprung up over the last year in reaction to perceived abuse by LDSBlogs.org. All of them have imitated to a great extent the LDSBlogs.org template and layout of different blog groups or islands.

Mormon Blogs, also known as Blogregate, was founded by liberal mormonism evangelist, and, until recently, leader of Sunstone magazine, John Dehlin. Like LDS Elect, Blogregate welcomes even more marginal mormon views than LDSBlogs.org allows. But unlike David Landrith’s approach, which allows readers choose which blogs are displayed in each box, Dehlin chose to groups his blogs into boxes organized by topic (General, Feminism, Technology, Family, Sexuality, etc.). By placing certain topics above the fold and near the top, Blogregate, promotes certain topics over others. Like the most recent incarnation of Planet LDS, and the original version of LDElect, the portal is built on the WordPress blogging platform.

Another relatively recent addition to available LDS Blog portals is the Mormon Blogosphere . Started by “Dr. B” and announced on his blog Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord, The Mormon Blogosphere was created to aggregate only solo LDS Blogs. In this sense it is a reaction to the Walmart-ification of LDSBlogs.org in the same way that LDSBLogs.org was originally a reaction to the overwhelming prominence of large LDS Group blogs. It is also a reaction to the exclusion of certain points of view at LDSBlogs.org. Dr B. aims to “not discriminate on the basis of sex, orientation, nationality, or content. If you are a Latter-day Saint in any way or associated with LDS I will be glad to aggregate your blog irregardless of your doctrinal position.” So like LDSElect.org and Blogregate, the Mormon Blogosphere welcomes doctrinal views that are far outside the mormon mainstream. The layout is again segmented into groups. Dr. B takes a unique approach, inspired by his background in Library work, by attempting to group blogs according to fine grained doctrinal disposition. Some blogs are in the Church Office Building or Tabernacle group. Others are in “Deseret Book” while others are out in the “Bodiggity’s.” The Mormon Blogosphere runs on Google’s Blogger platform service on blogspot.com

Up Next: Part 3 – A Technical and Usability Review of LDS Blog Portal Functionality

The delisting happened after Steve Evans, who is the founder of one of the most visited LDS Blogs, By Common Consent, responded to my critical comment with “J. Max, if you were at all sincere about withdrawing from the Bloggernacle (and indeed I long hoped you were!), you would never have posted your site as part of the largest Bloggernacle aggregator there is. Now is the time for you to prove your sincerity and honesty, by never showing your face anywhere in the Bloggernacle ever again. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Officially, Steve Evans has no administrative power over LDSBlogs.org. However, within an hour or two, my blog was delisted. It happened without warning and without explanation. My blog and blog posts simply vanished as if they had never been included.

So how did this happen?

According to one source, the issue of whether my blog should be delisted was not discussed by the group of bloggers who are supposedly in charge of the portal. It wasn’t even presented for discussion. He found out that it had been removed from me. Apparently blogs are often added and removed without consulting the founders of the portal. As far as I can gather, additions and removals are made nearly unilaterally by two or three individuals with very little oversight.

There is some confusion about what “The Bloggernacle” is. Does it refer to all LDS Blogs? Or does it refer to a specific group of inter-linking, multually supportive LDS Blogs represented at least functionally by LDSBlogs.org?

While I think that many people want to apply the term to all LDS Blogs, functionally, as in Steve Evan’s comment, it is restricted to those blogs included in the LDSBlogs.org portal, and perhaps the blogs listed at LDSElect.org.

Why would an LDS Blogger who, like me, finds much of the content at LDSBlogs.org to be questionable and outside of the mainstream of Mormon views want to be listed and included in the portal? It is because LDSBlogs.org has a virtual stranglehold on LDS blog promotion.

If an LDS blog wants to increase traffic and readership they have to get included in a blog aggregator.

But none of the existing blog aggregators are a very comfortable place for more conservative, orthodox LDS bloggers who have qualms about giving tacit support to the content promoted by the portals by being included. However, the desire to not promote by association is counterbalanced by the need to attract readership.

So for all practical purposes, LDSBlogs.org has a great deal of power over which LDS Blog conversations get discovered and promoted, and which are ignored. And power entails accountability.

Currently, six of the nine solo-bloggers that originally founded LDSBlogs.org have become permanent contributing bloggers at the By Common Consent blog.

In Part 2 I will review some of the history of LDS Blog portals.