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Video is a great way to share good Church-related content on the Web. Many people think that videos, in order to be effective, need to be very polished or take a lot of time. In browsing through some of the online video services, I’ve run across some good amateur examples of using video to help spread the word.

The following are a few videos that are concerned with temples. These are just a few; there are actually a good number of these on the Web.

• Tour of Las Vegas Temple grounds. Someone shot some videos as they walked around the Las Vegas Temple grounds. The natural audio accentuates the peace and quiet of the area. (4:06)
• Spain Madrid Temple. Basic slideshow made from still images, with music. The video has a title and prologue in Spanish. (1:40)
• Los Angeles Temple Travels. A couple visits the Los Angeles Temple. Great slide-show shots and music express the feelings they experienced as they visited. (2:48)

Another good topic for sharing good information about the Church (and one that is often related to temples) is the subject of temple marriages. These two videos were shared by couples who were happy about their temple marriages. (They do a good job of pointing out that temple marriages are not weird, strange, or totally secret. These are normal, average couples getting married in a way that they choose.)

• A Temple Marriage. Video shot after a temple marriage at the Salt Lake Temple. Shows happy family and friends, celebrating the marriage. No voice; just two popular songs played in the background of the video. (6:52)
• Courtship and Marriage at the San Diego Temple. This is a couple’s wedding video, shot at the San Diego Temple. Nice video with incidental music background. (2:59)

Some people are directly trying to share information about missionaries, mission life, and the fruits of missionary work. I thought the following were very good examples of this genre of shared video:

• Temple Square Mission. A documentary clip about missionaries on Temple Square. (1:47)
• Provo MTC. Documentary clip about what goes on in the MTC as missionaries prepare to serve. (2:31)
• BJ’s Conversion Story. A recent convert tells why he decided to join the Church and the happiness he has found in the Church. (3:14)
• Mike’s Conversion Story. Another recent convert tells why he decided to join the Church. (12:15)
• Finding Lost Sheep. Nice video montage (with background song) that shows pictures of LDS converts and missionaries. (4:32)

One thing I was surprised about is that there aren’t more videos online about visiting Church history sites. There are many such sites around the world (and especially in North America), and it would seem a natural for sharing information about the Church. I did find one short (0:36) video clip about the Sacred Grove.

How can you encourage such videos? Link to them from your blog or Web site. You can even embed them, if you desire. (Most of the above videos have embedding code available at the video’s site.) It could be even better if you were to share some of your own videos. Just upload them to places like YouTube or Google Video, and then they can be shared around the world.

Drop us a line (or leave a comment) sharing how you’ve used video to help put good LDS-oriented content on the Web.

-Allen

Clayton Christensen is a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the popular business book The Innovator’s Dilemma. He’s also a Mormon and has recently posted an article on his website about why he belongs to the Mormon church and why he believes its doctrines. He also explains how he received a testimony of the Book of Mormon.

This is a great example of sharing your testimony online. We applaud all Church members, prominent or not, who share why they believe.

Clayton Christensen also wrote an article that appears in next month’s issue of the Ensign: My Ways Are Not Your Ways (PDF, p. 54.) Speaking of missionary work, he said:

I could not lead that work with passion and credibility unless I could speak in present-tense verbs and first-person pronouns about finding people for the missionaries to teach. I have learned to use terms that associate me with Mormonism in my conversations—comments about my mission to Korea, my children’s missions, my assignments in the Church, my having attended Brigham Young University, and so on. These comments open the door for a conversation about the Church. Most who notice that I have opened this door choose not to walk through it. A few do, however, usually saying, “So you’re a Mormon?” I then ask if they’d like to learn more about us.

What a great example of being a missionary, both online and offline.

Via: Mormanity

Someone asked me how to set up Microsoft Word so that she could translate and type some good thing about Mormonism and the Mormon Church in another language (not English). I suspect that other people may be interested in knowing how to do it.

This is a quick explanation but it should be enough. For more information you can visit the Microsoft site

To type text in another language, you should install and enable a keyboard layout.

1. In Microsoft Windows XP, click the Start button, (and Settings), and Control Panel.

2. Click Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options, and then click Regional and Language Options.

Note In Classic view, double-click Regional and Language Options.

3. Click the Languages tab, and then under Text services and input languages, click Details.

4. Under Installed services, click Add.

5. In the Input language list, click the language for which you want to install a keyboard layout.

6. If the language that you select has more than one possible keyboard layout, select the Keyboard layout/IME check box, and then, in the list, click the layout that you want.

7. If you want to be able to switch keyboard layouts by using the Language bar, under Preferences, click Language Bar, and then select the Show the Language bar on the desktop check box.

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.

Last week I attended the Mormon church’s Tech Talks in Salt Lake City. They offered eight presentations from which everyone could choose three. Tonight the Church’s tech staff will present another round of “talks” — this time in Provo. I recommend them for anyone interested in technology:

LDS Church Tech Talks in Provo
January 23rd, 6:30 P.M.
BYU 8th Stake Center (1021 South 500 West, Provo, UT)

After tonight’s tech talks I’ll post my notes on both sessions.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prepared a new manual about the teaching of President Spencer W. Kimball. This manual will be used by the adults of the Mormon Church in their classes in 2007.

The last lesson of the manual is about sharing the Gospel. Among other things we read:

“There is a spiritual adventure in doing missionary work… It is exciting and rewarding. The hours, the effort, the wondering, all are worth it when even one soul expresses repentance and faith and a desire to be baptized…

“Sharing the gospel brings peace and joy into our own lives, enlarges our own hearts and souls in behalf of others, increases our own faith, strengthens our own relationship with the Lord, and increases our own understanding of gospel truths…

“The Lord has promised great blessings to us in proportion to how well we share the gospel. We will receive help from the other side of the veil as the spiritual miracles occur. The Lord has told us that our sins will be forgiven more readily as we bring souls unto Christ and remain steadfast in bearing testimony to the world…”

There is no mention of Internet missionary work in the manual, but the same principles applies to what we can do on the Internet for the people who don’t know well enough the Mormon Church: we will receive peace, we will increase our understanding of the Gospel, we will increase our faith, and more…

So, please consider being involved in online missionary work: it is an option even if you are shy! You may create a simple site, write a blog or help us write some new content or design a site.

There are many things that can be done! If you want to help, please contact us.

Announced at the LDS Tech Talks last night, the Church has just launched a new site for anyone interested in technology: LDS Tech. The site will allow Church members to communicate with technology employees at Church headquarters and each other, to discuss technology problems and solutions the Church faces. The site includes a discussion forum, the first forum ever on an official Church site.

Link: LDS Tech

This spring PBS will air a 4-hour special on “The Mormons”. Award-winning filmmaker Helen Whitney spent 3 years creating this program, “interviewing ‘hundreds and hundreds of people’ ranging from LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley to everyday church members to those who are openly antagonistic toward the church.” She hopes it will dispel a variety of stereotypes and misconceptions about the Mormon church.

Set your calendars and recorders:

“The Mormons” on PBS
Apr 30 - May 1 on PBS

Via: LDSNewsWatch.com

Finalement dans le website officiel de l’Église de Jésus Christ des Saints des Derniers Jours (Église Mormone) elles ont été publiées les écritures en français en ligne.

Il y à quelques semaines ont été publiées les écritures dans espagnol, mais dans un récent communiqué nous avons su que finalement les écritures ont été publiées même en italien, français et allemand.

Pour trouver les écritures visitées cette page : écritures mormones en français.

Les écritures mises à disposition en ligne en français comprennent le Livre de Mormon, Doctrines et Alliances, et la Perle de Grand Prix.

Si vous voulez la Bible en ligne (la même édition employée de l’Église Mormone en français) vous pouvez visiter ce site : Les Sainte Bible, (Louis Segond).

Finalmente nel website ufficiale della Chiesa di Gesù Cristo dei Santi degli Ultimi Giorni (Chiesa Mormone) sono state pubblicate online le scritture in italiano. Alcune settimane fa erano state pubblicate le scritture in spagnolo, ma in un recente comunicato abbiamo saputo che finalmente le scritture sono state pubblicate anche in italiano, francese e tedesco.

Per trovare le scritture visitate questa pagina: scritture mormoni in italiano.

Le scritture messe a disposizione online in italiano comprendono il Libro de Mormon, Dottrine e Alleanze, e La Perla di Gran Prezzo.

Se volete la Bibbia online (la stessa edizione usata dalla Chiesa Mormone in Italia) potete visitare questo sito: La Sacra Bibbia, versione riveduta.