Many of you will remember that about 6 months ago, after getting booted from the most popular LDS Blogs portal, I started a portal for LDS Blogs at NothingWavering.org focusing on more mainstream and orthodox Mormon blogs.
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.
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.”
I have been blogging since January 2004, and blogging about specifically LDS topics since August of that same year (first under the pseudonym “Ebenezer Orthodoxy” and later under my own name as one of the founding members of The Millennial Star blog). During that time I participated in the recently coalescing LDS blogging community called “The Bloggernacle.”
In August 2005 I withdrew from the “Bloggernacle,” disappointed by what I considered a widespread, inappropriate emphasis in the community on criticizing the Church and questioning its leadership and policies. I announced my withdrawal very publicly in a post entitled Alternate Voices: Why I Am Abandoning the Bloggernacle which sparked a little community controversy at the time.
