Good things you can do on the Internet

December 13th, 2006 by Richard K Miller | Filed under Ideas, Mormon, Online missionary work.

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My friend Brian recently spoke in church about positive things you can do on the Internet. The talk was aimed at “regular” church members that happen to use the Internet — including parents and children — not Internet experts. There’s something for everyone. Here are his notes:

  1. Share your talents online with photos, music and videos

    • Upload your photos of temples and church history sites
    • Records mutual skits and post them to video sharing sites
    • Be sure to use their “tagging” service and use words like “mormon, mormon history, temples, families, etc”

  2. Keep Your Standards Online

    • If you use sites like Myspace or Facebook, keep your standards high
    • Talk about church activities you’ve enjoyed
    • Put photos of Temples in your photo streams

  3. Link to true principles

    • If you have a popular site that you run, be sure to hyperlink words like faith and mormon to the true teachings
    • If you have a high pagerank, be sure to link to the church’s sites

  4. Start a family/ward blog or website

    • Don’t be administrative in your posts, but talk about your beliefs and give information for readers
    • Be a ward blogger and write about sacrament meeting each week
    • Have a weekly FHE activity to add your testimony about different principles of the Gospel. Point to those principles in the scriptures

  5. Maintain a site about a Church doctrine or interest

    • If you have a special spot in your heart for your local temple, start a website that gives information and history of the building
    • Use resources like the More Good Foundation (http://www.moregoodfoundation.org) They will give you the tools and help you need.
    • Find similar sites and link to them
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7 Responses to “Good things you can do on the Internet”

  1. Naiah Earhart | 14/12/06

    Have you guys looked into church policy on ward blogs? I was under the impression that we were not to have any website beyond the ones on lds.org…

  2. Richard | 14/12/06

    Naiah, you’re correct — ward-sponsored blogs are currently not permitted. Any blogs would have to be from an individual church member commenting on what he/she learned in church, but not speaking for the ward.

    Maybe some day the Church will sponsor “ward bloggers” itself.

  3. Guy Murray | 20/12/06

    Then again, there’s nothing to stop anyone from starting their own individual blog, even giving it their ward’s name and inviting local members to participate. While the Ward itself may not be able to sponsor anything other than their own sub site of LDS.org, the more LDS blogs that are out there with good content the better it is for the Church.

    I think Richard has the right idea by suggesting that people start ward blogs or egroups or whatever they can to help in their wards and foster good internet content.

    I routinely send mass emails to folks in our ward when I post things on my blog Messenger and Advocate that I think will interest them.

    Dave over at DMI had an interesting post related to this topic over here.

  4. ldsWebguy » Good things you can do on the Internet | 2/01/07

    [...] For some good ideas, see a post on the More Good Foundation’s newsletter that lists several good things you can do on the Internet. [...]

  5. Rachel Woods, About LDS Guide | 4/01/07

    This is a great list. I also like Mormon Hacker’s idea to put a link to mormon.org in an email signature:
    http://mormonhacker.blogspot.com/2007/01/put-link-to-mormonorg-in-your-email.html
    I think writing about spiritual experience in emails to our friends is a good idea too. Thanks for the list!

  6. Jacob Durrant | 8/01/07

    I’d like to second the importance of hyperlinking to other pro-Mormon sites. As most of this crowd probably already knows, hyperlinking to other sites increases their Google pagerank even if users never actually click on your particular hyperlink. Higher pagerank means pro-Mormon sites appear first on Google searches.

    Along those lines, I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I’ve created a resource to help bloggers/webmasters provide background information for their readers via hyperlinks. My page, AllAboutMormons.com, provides basic information about the Church, largely geared towards those who are unfamiliar with our beliefs. I’ve set up a web form at http://www.allaboutmormons.com/linkto.php. Users need only type in any text (be it blog comments, blog entries, or webpage text), and the resource automatically identifies key words and inserts links to explanations offered on my site. Users can review the inserted links to accept/reject them before posting to blogs or webpages. Anyone who wants to use this resource to help boost my pagerank while providing your readers with valuable background information is more than happy to do so!  (I’ve used the resource on this very comment as a demonstration.)

    See AllAboutMormons.com for more information.

  7. More Good Foundation Blog » The Web needs your participation | 8/02/07

    [...] Believing that many are “kept from the truth because they know not where to find it,” we consider participation on the Internet by faithful Mormons to be extremely important. (We’ve previously discussed good things you can do on the Internet.) [...]

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