Church Blogging?
Many Latter-day Saint bloggers have wondered whether blogs will elicit an Alternative Voices II-type reaction from the Church. Fewer, I would guess, think the Church will embrace rather than reject blogs. A new blog might be evidence that the latter is more likely than the former.
ldsWebguy is a blog I just became aware of today that is kept by Larry Richman, the Director of the Internet Coordination Group for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On his about page, Larry states that
My job is to help coordinate the content and services of Church Web sites and related applications. I am also the Product Manager of LDS.org and lead the Search Engine Optimization Team.
The blog, of course, contains a disclaimer that its content is not an official statement of the Church. But in one recent post, Larry outlines his optimistic view of the internet as a resource for the Church:
The miracles of technology and communication that President Kimball talked about 32 years ago continues today at an ever increasing pace. We are in the middle of the biggest technology changes ever in the history of the world. Years from now, our grandchildren will read our stories and say, “Wow, grandma and grandpa really lived in pioneer times. They were born before Internet.†. . .
I believe this modern explosion of inventions and technology really puts us in “new pioneer times.†. . . .
There are already a number of thought-provoking posts up that ask how the Church might best make use of the internet as a resource. Larry also challenges us all to use the internet appropriately. This should be a good blog to keep up with.
It looks like A Soft Answer announced this blog on August 3. Note to self: always check with Dave Sundwall before announcing a blog.
Comment by john f. — August 10, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
Agreed, I am very much interested on how his blog progresses. I, for one, doubt that twe will hear any condemnation of the blogs. They get too much search traffic that would otherwise go to anti sites.
Comment by J. Stapley — August 10, 2006 @ 5:16 pm
I agree, J. We will continue to be warned to use the Web and all media wisely but there is no inherent danger in blogs that needs to be warned about. The fact is that faithful saints tend to sound like faithful saints on blogs so what is there to warn about on that? And as you said, the blogs slanted against the church won’t be going away so the more church-friendly bloggers there are the better I think.
Comment by Geoff J — August 10, 2006 @ 5:35 pm
Thanks for the heads up on this.
I also like the comments by J. and Geoff.
Oh to have a crystal ball and see how this develops.
Comment by Eric — August 10, 2006 @ 6:48 pm
One should not neglect Taking Genealogy, by Dan Lawyer, a Product Manager in the Family History Department of the Church. His weblog has been around at least since March of this year.
Comment by Mark Butler — August 10, 2006 @ 9:01 pm
I am sending Larry Richman the URL for my public counter/tracker. This
shows what people are searching on when they come to my site.
One of the goals of SEO (search engine optimization) is to find out what search terms people are using, which “should” bring them to your site, but are actually taking them elsewhere. Looking at your own logs doesn’t tell you that. Ttheoretically, you want to look at your competitors’ logs.
For instance, my blog gets people from around the world looking for the Book of Mormon in various world language translations. My blog side-bar has links and phone #’s that people can go to and call. Theoretically, I’d like those people to originally go to the proper LDS.org web page. My goal is to supplment, not steal from, whatever is on LDS.org and Mormon.org
Call to action for bloggers: If you have a public counter/tracker, send Larry the URL. If you have a private one, or a private referral log, send him an occasional snap-shot if you think that LDS.org or Mormon.org should be getting some of those referrals from search engines.
That may help him see what people are looking for, determin if it is something that the church websites could/should be offering, and how to craft or improve DS.org and Mormon.org pages to rank better for those queries.
If you are tech-savvy, set up something to “grep” (filter) those logs, and send him just the referral entries from search engines.
Comment by Bookslinger — August 11, 2006 @ 1:09 pm
Here’s to LDS blogging! I think it’s a wonderful ways for families to keep a great history, complete with photographs, movies, and stories from many contributors.
Comment by LifeOnaPlate — August 22, 2006 @ 8:36 pm
I’ve heard that alot of people got scared off when the Church stopped alot of the old ward and stake websites that were on personal websites and things like that.
That was only so they could have a unified presence with each ward and stake having an official site on LDS.org. Sure they look minimal at times now, but they are planning new features that will really make these stand out and these will always be somewhat more than what many people can program themselves. These will prove to be highly useful to many.
On the ‘search engine optimization’ matter, there have been some recent changes in the search engine industry of late that will change the way most earch engines rank sites.
Now they will take into account the age of the site, and the relevancy of the content. For example, if a site has a webring link or an FFA (Free For All) link page, it may not be looked on as favorably as it might have in the past . The links should be to similar or generally related content, and the content of the page should be relevant to the overall page. Page Rank is no longer considered that important now.
The Church has it right on both counts. The lds.org site has existed in some form since 1997 but only with conference talks added by the Church after the conference is over, and the content since 2000 has been added to by the Church itself on a rather frequent basis, with links largely to other websites owned or maintained by the Church or its other organizations, such as BYU.
One problem has been the long URLs. There’s a certain point at which Google will bypass a particular page’s URL and not list it if it is too long of a character string in one part of a URL, usually the last part (as is seen in some of the beta site pages right now). There are some other URL string issues that should also be resolved, which will actually help search engines spider all applicable pages on the site properly, the end result is that the desired result of putting up lds.org, getting the words of the Prophets out to the world, will be available to anyone, just by searching on a topic and finding the lds.org results in their search. And not just one page, but maybe quite a few separate article pages at that.
Comment by James W. Anderson — September 21, 2006 @ 2:33 pm