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A new analytics program called Woopra allows website operators to not only see who is visiting their website in realtime but to initiate a conversation with them. This has interesting implications for online missionary work since it means that investigators could be offered help as they search online.

Here is a 3-minute video demonstrating Woopra on MormonWiki.com:

This strikes me as the online equivalent of the store clerk who asks, “Can I help you find anything?” You usually answer, “No, I’m just looking around.”

Elder Cook has touted privacy as one of the great benefits of learning about the gospel online:

“There are a lot of people today who would like to know more about our faith but they are concerned about having their privacy invaded. They want to look at things in their own time and in their own way. They do not want to feel like they have any pressure…. We feel that the Internet and the privacy that it affords people is a wonderful way to do that….” (Internet to find, Missionaries to Teach)

I suspect that most people will prefer not to be interrupted while searching for information about the Church. However, I wonder if a small handful of people would appreciate being offered some help?

In celebration of its 10 year anniversary, Google has released a tool for searching its oldest search index, from 2001. A search for “Mormon beliefs” or “Mormon missionaries” returned a very different set of results 7 years ago.

Due to the efforts of the Church and many Church members, people looking for information about Mormonism can now expect to find a wide variety of stories, testimonies, and experiences from Mormons living their faith.

And there’s still more to do.

Tags: Google, history

Today Elder Ballard spoke at the BYU-Hawaii graduation and urged graduates to use the Internet to share the Gospel. He mentioned blogging, podcasts, Facebook, video-sharing sites, and “people using … search engines to hunt for topics about the Church.” Here are selected portions:

The emergence of New Media is facilitating a world-wide conversation on almost every subject including religion, and nearly everyone can participate.
…
Conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the Church teaches.
…
The challenge is that there are too many people participating in conversation about the Church for our Church personnel to converse with and respond to individually. We cannot answer every question, satisfy every inquiry, and respond to every inaccuracy that exists. …some who seek answers want them to come directly from a member of the Church, like each one of you.
…
May I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. You can download videos from Church and other appropriate sites, including Newsroom at LDS.org, and send them to your friends. You can write to media sites on the Internet that report on the Church, and voice your views as to the accuracy of the reports.
…
Others have recorded and posted their testimonies of the Restoration, the teachings of the Book of Mormon, and other gospel subjects on popular video-sharing sites. You, too, can tell your story to nonmembers in this way.
…
Use stories and words that they will understand.

Elder Ballard also cited the Indy Books blog, where Bookslinger chronicles his daily missionary work.

I think this will prove to be a landmark talk.

Full transcript: Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church

Press release: Apostle Urges Students to Use New Media

(Thanks to several people who sent me this.)

MormonWiki.com is our collaborative site where Church members can write articles on Mormon beliefs and doctrines. The potential downside of a collaborative site (a “wiki”) is that spammers and vandals can participate too.

Among the most prolific participants at Mormonwiki.com is Rick Willoughby, who has volunteered countless hours to write articles and combat spam and vandalism. Rick recently pointed out an interesting pattern: automated spam attacks on Mormonwiki usually fail when the article contains any reference to the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C). It turns out the ampersand in “D&C” fouls up the spam attacks. Rick jokingly called these cases “spam attacks halted by modern revelation.”

Despite occasional “impotent vandalism,” as Rick calls it, Mormonwiki.com has been remarkably successful. It recently reached its 1,000th article in English, and there are hundreds of articles in other languages. It’s by far the most popular website published by the More Good Foundation. Mormonwiki.com is a rising star among the many sites that provide good information about the Mormon faith online. For this we can thank the dozens of participants like Rick who’ve volunteered their time to write and collaborate on articles.

If you’re interested in participating, please visit Mormonwiki.com and see our Beginner’s Guide.

After The Mormons aired, I contacted a fellow who had written a lengthy email to PBS complaining about inaccuracies in the show. He regretted sending the hastily written email because it lacked the tact and style that would have been more characteristic of him. But his email already had wings — it was being forwarded to hundreds of people, and in some cases even modified from his original text.

I emailed him, suggesting he start a blog:

I think it would be great if you setup a blog. You could post the original letter and follow-ups and allow people to comment. Let people pass around the address of your blog instead of the text that might get altered. The world needs more blogs from faithful members who defend the Church. I’d be glad to help you set it up if you’re interested.

But he wasn’t interested:

I don’t have an interest in setting up a blog. I do not want to spend time becoming an internet apologist for the Church.

So I tried one last time:

…the Internet needs more faithful voices. With as much effort as you put into your letter, you appear to have the courage and energy to be such a voice. Consider a line from Elder Ballard’s Nov 2005 conference talk: “We call upon Internet providers and Web site creators to become more responsible regarding their potential for influence….”

In President Kimball’s address “When the World Will be Converted” he talked of using radio, TV, and satellite to spread the Gospel and that he believed “the Lord is anxious to put into our hands inventions of which we laymen have hardly had a glimpse.” That was 1974. Could Church members have envisioned an invention that would allow us to connect instantly with billions of people all over the globe? I feel like we have the opportunity to share the Gospel in a completely new way.

While his response was kind, he was still uninterested:

you contend well for a faithful use of the internet. thanks for all you’re doing.

What went wrong?

He can certainly do as he pleases, but if he has the time to publish a lengthy, well-written letter to PBS — and it was well-written — why not publish on a blog? Blogs allow for an open dialog between parties and preserve the history and fidelity of the text. (We believe blogs to be authentic; we believe emails to be authentic, as far as they are forwarded correctly.) Publishing online where everyone would see might have tempered his initial response. It facilitates a gentlemen’s duel — if we must use the word “duel” at all — instead of a drive-by shooting.

My offer to him stands for everyone. If you need help starting a blog so you can share your beliefs and testimony, we’d be glad to help.

Here are a few more good LDS websites we haven’t mentioned previously:

1. WardSocial.com and Came2Pass.com — These two sites allow you to submit and vote on stories related to the Church. Like their predecessor Sustaind.org, these sites operate like Digg.com. In addition to finding interesting LDS stories on these three sites, prudence suggets we should also branch out of our communities to participate on broader, non-Mormon sites like Digg.com, where we can also submit and vote on stories about our religion. (The creator of Came2pass.com is an avid Digg user.)

2. IfYeArePrepared.org — Here you’ll find a variety of options for subscribing to Church content. For example, you can subscribe by email or RSS to the Home Teaching message, which will be delivered each month. You can also subscribe to the Visiting Teaching message, the Priesthood/Relief Society lessons, and current Ensign articles. Their recent redesign looks awesome.

3. SpicyWardWeb — This isn’t a website, but a tool you can install. It’s a bit techie but really cool. After logging into your ward website on LDS.org, this Greasemonkey script will alter your ward membership directory so the addresses link to Google Maps. You can click on the address of anyone in your ward to view their location on the map. To use this you’ll need Firefox and the Greasemonkey add-on. The developer says more interesting scripts for LDS.org are coming.

Whenever we Mormons build something cool — like these sites above — I believe we should constantly ask ourselves how we can include people of others faiths. Even sites intended for Church members can at least include a paragraph or link that gives context and background to non-Mormons. This inclusionary attitude will help us make friends and avoid cliquishness.

In the last weekend in Salt Lake City The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had its 177th Annual General Conference.

Many talks were highly inspiring but thinking about MGF and missionary work online this is my take of the Conference (all personal opinion, obviously).

I can’t remember of any specific talk given about missionary work, but several speakers, including the Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley and Elder Tom Perry, gave straightforward testimonies of the truth of the message of the Church. Perhaps we are approaching the time in which nothing less than a direct testimony will save the world (or at least some of his inhabitants). People need to choose, as Joshua said a long time ago, who they want to serve.

We should follow our leaders in giving more frequently our testimonies to the world, and since very few of us have the opportunity of being broadcasted on television to millions of people, we may consider the easier medium offered by the internet. Our Mormon Testimonies Website can help you in doing it. You can do it individually or you can organize a group of members and have them write their testimonies (and stories) on the website.

President James E. Faust described the great forgiving attitude of the Amish. The Amish obviously don’t use Internet, but I am sure that those people involved in that great forgiving episode, if they were using the Internet, they wouldn’t be involved in criticizing the Mormon Church. They have better things to do, and I am sure that they are getting closer to the Lord because of that.

I have the impression that even more that in the past, what really matters is not the official religious affiliation, but where people’s hearts are. In other words, the ways of the Lord and the ways of the world are diverging always more and good and honest people from all denominations (such as that groups of Amish, for example) will be attracted to the truth soon or later, even if after this life. On the other hand, even some members of the truth Church, who are simply members for other reasons than the love of the truth, will not be able to stand the day and will fall away, eventually.

So, let us be courageous (as President Monson said) and let us help the Church by writing our testimonies, so that the world will read them and some souls will be converted. Don’t worry if your writing is not perfect. Joseph Smith’s writing wasn’t either!

Today we attended the eBusiness Day at BYU. Thanks to Steve, Jeff, and Dan for letting us come. We talked to several people and passed out flyers on 12 Ways to Share the Gospel on the Internet.

1. Answer a Question at Yahoo! Answers
2. Blog your testimony in your mission language
3. Blog what you learned in Sunday School
4. Edit Mormonwiki.com or Wikipedia.org
5. Link to good websites (not just lds.org)
6. Podcast your parents and grandparents
7. Post mission and wedding photos on Flickr
8. Post your testimony on mormontestimonies.org
9. Post your video testimony on YouTube
10. Share your beliefs in a Facebook Note
11. Tell someone in Second Life about the Church
12. Volunteer with the More Good Foundation

There’s also a PDF version for printing (thanks to Connor for the design.)

We’re going to do all of these ourselves, and hope you will join us.

Amazon and Google employ complex algorithms that generally deliver, respectively, relevant book recommendations and relevant search results. Here are a couple of exceptions:

1. On Amazon.com, the Doubleday version of the Book of Mormon is being advertised in tandem with a book about Freemasonry, as if they were related. (See screenshot.)
2. If you search Google.com for the term “Jew”, you’ll see a disclaimer explaining that you may find unpleasant results. (See screenshot.)
   

   If you recently used Google to search for the word “Jew,” you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google…. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted.

   The page goes on to explain that “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context, while Jewish organization are more likely to use the term “Jewish,” so search results for the former are generally more negative than search results for the latter. Sound familiar?

Plenty of sites that Google considers relevant for “Mormon” are full of doctrinal inaccuracies. Google, can we get a disclaimer too?

(Hat tip to Will F. for noticing the Amazon.com issue.)

The Mormon church recently held “tech talks”, a series of talks on how the Church uses technology. By attending both the Salt Lake City and Provo events, I was able to hear 6 of the 8 talks and meet many employees. I thought both events were excellent. My notes follow.

CIO Presentation (Keynote) — Joel Dehlin

• Our Vision:
  1. High quality content (message) to all corners of the earth, in native languages, in multiple formats, on multiple devices
  2. Decrease administration and increase ministratrion
  3. Bring souls to Christ
• Now: Mormon.org is testing live chats with investigators. The Helsinki temple dedication was broadcast by satellite to all of the former Soviet Union. Church operates several websites. 50M page views/month, 5M uniques, 61 country sites, 42 languages (on the Web.) New missionary web app that streamlines calls.
• Future: 150 languages on the Web. One search for all Church websites and BYU properties. Leader portals with online stats and callings. Member portals with targeted info on callings. Online training. Missionary tools.
• Challenges: scale, languages, complexity (languages w/o infrastructure), spending the Lord’s money wisely. The widow’s mite is on Joel’s mind when he is negotiating or hiring.
• How you can help: 1. tech.lds.org 2. develop things on your own and donate them 3. work at the Church (work on the design team)

• “We are confident that as the work of the Lord expands, he will inspire men to develop the means whereby the membership of the Church, wherever they may be, can be counseled in an intimate and personal way by his chosen prophet. Communication is the sinew that binds the Church as one great family. Between those facilities which are now available and those which are on the horizon, we shall be able to converse one with another according to the needs and circumstances of the time.” — Gordon B. Hinckley, 1981

• There’s been a “gathering” of highly intelligent, talented folks at the Church.
• Q&A: Largest challenge? Deciding which “horse to ride” among options like Java, .Net, PHP, Ruby, etc.

LDS Technology Community — Tom Welch

• Launching tech.lds.org, a community site for Church members interested in technology.
• Will 1. share 2. engage 3. enlist (ideas, testing help) 4. encourage (development, creativity)
• Brethren support of Tech Talks
• Want to continue to encourage development of projects by members (as has been done in the past)
• Idea: audio transmittal of sacrament mtg talks to shut-ins

Family History — Gordon Clarke & Kevin Ward

• New Family Search to launch soon, 3 years in the making, a web services platform
• “Master collaborative online family tree” — genealogy contributors can merge data or agree to disagree (wiki style)
• Print temple ordinance cards at home
• Real time live data on marriages, deaths
• Online image archives
• Client to be released under open source license (not GPL compatible)

Interaction Design — Tadd Giles

• Very talented team, started as skunkworks project, now very popular internally
• Our designers do it all — customer interaction, analysis, graphics design, coding, etc.
• Follow principles of Getting Real from 37Signals — prototype in high fidelity
• Tools: Mac OS X, TextMate, Yahoo UI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, some agile processes, some pair programming
• Challenges: Demand exceeds supply, consistency across sites, globalization, accessibility (”we should be the most accessible site on the planet”), mobility, learning the “Lord’s Way” (Dallin H. Oaks’s book)

Infrastructure — Dave Prestwich

• 1600 servers for Church sites + 2000 for FamilySearch
• 36 TB of Oracle, 200 TB SAN, 400 megabits bandwidth, 115 temples with satellite links
• Use open source like Nagios and have contributed back to the project
• NOC on BYU campus
• Must have awesome spam filtering for General Authorities and full-time missionaries, 1 M emails/day
• All new phone deployments using Cisco VOIP
• “Still more cost effective to use Windows on the desktop right now” but “OpenOffice.org on the 26,000 clerk computers”

Solutions Delivery — Rich Farr

• What gets me up in the morning: Oct 1981 talk from Gordon B. Hinckley
• What keeps me up at night: global Church, some ward clerks have never used a calculator, a chapel in Papa New Guinea is 6 bamboos and a tarp
• We use existing business apps for non-unique functions (accounting), build our own for unique functions (missionary management) or when licensing would be too expensive (fleet management)
• Missionary app supports 19,000 business rules (e.g. this missionary can’t receive a visa to this country) but Apostles still make the call
  Cutting edge governance: 13 portfolios with own mini-CIO and staff, Brethren set priorities and budget so we don’t have to

Read more notes on the Tech Talks from Connor Boyack, Gary Thornock, Nic Johnson, J. Max Wilson, A Random John, and Matt Harrison.