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November 10th, 2006 by Richard K Miller | Filed under Ideas, Mormon, The Church.If you're new here, read more about the More Good Foundation. We help members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) share their beliefs on the Internet. Learn more about what Mormons believe or talk with Mormons at LDS.net.
David of MormonConverts.com recently shared with me a good idea: Ward Bloggers.
The Church already allows ward members to share a (private) site with the news and members of their ward. If (public) blogging software were added, each bishop in the Church could call a local person to be responsible for writing about happenings in the ward — upcoming Sunday School topics, with links to the readings for that week, or who spoke in sacrament meeting and what they spoke about.
I’d love to read the ward blogs of areas in my mission — to know that someone I taught had spoken in Church, or that a member I knew had sent a son on a mission. I’d also want to read the blog of my “home ward” to stay connected with the many good people that influenced me as a youth.
Why not be able to use current public blogging software, i.e. WordPress that allows the blogs to be private and accessible only by those designated?
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I think WordPress would be great, but in my opinion the blogs would have to be public to be most useful.
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This is an aside, but when I try to find out about the actual individuals behind the More Good Foundation, I don’t find much information.
Perhaps the About page could have a section with bios and descriptions of the people involved? Or maybe this information is available elsewhere and I didn’t find it …
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We made a ward blog a little more than a year ago. It worked great for a couple weeks, especially with the Web-savvy youth. However, we had to take it down because the Church doesn’t want unit Web sites outside of the one hosted on LDS.org. I actually knew this before we started the blog, but for some reason I didn’t make the connection between Web pages and blogs. I don’t harbor any bad feelings for the leaders who suggested we move the information to the official ward site, but it would be nice to make the information more accessible.
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Hmm, interesting idea. I didn’t know you could link to personal sites through your ward site. It’s been a while since I logged onto my ward’s site. I’ll have to look into it again and see what’s up.
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Dennis: This isn’t a possibility yet, but sort of a request and a hypothetical.
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I don’t know — I too would love to read up on my former wards, but I can see some potential privacy issues with this. Imagine if the blogger wrote that someone’s baby died, or gave a negative review to someone’s sacrament talk.
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Actually, my idea would be to write an article each week on a gospel centered topic.
In the article we could link to official LDS sites and LDS related sites that More Good Foundation promotes.
The truth is that we (the Mormon Community) are getting killed on the search engines for most of our LDS related search terms.
Many (a high percentage) of English speaking investigators go to the web to find out more about the church, only to find MANY anti-Mormon sites.
These sites seriously undermine our missionary efforts. (I’ve seen this happend first hand more than one time in my own small ward.)
Ward bloggers, given some guidlines, could dramatically improve our search rankings and ability for investigators to find pro-LDS information.
Let’s face it, the Internet is “THE” source for information (at least in the US). As a church, we really need and “can” do more to help out in steering internet visitors to pro-LDS sources.
David Frey
MormonConverts.com
P.S. Thanks to the More Good Foundation and it’s financial supporters that are actively engaged in this good (and sorely needed) cause.
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