Blogs4God and GospelShout both recently launched interactive Christian news websites where the articles and placement of those articles are determined by their users, like they are on the popular news site Digg.
Digg is one of the hottest and fastest growing news websites online. Unlike traditional news websites like cnn.com or msnbc.com, on Digg stories are submitted by users and their placement on the page is determined by the voting of the Digg community of users. It’s a truly democratic, Web 2.0 approach to news.
Digg originally launched as a tech-only news site. While it has added categories for world, business, sports, and entertainment, it is still dominated by technology stories because its user-base is primarily young men with a strong interst in technology. So, as Digg has grown so have calls for similar less tech-centric news websites and similar sites that focus on other niches of news.
Last year Pligg was released. Pligg is open-source (free) software that allows people to quickly and easily create their own Digg-like site. Since its release there has been an explosion of Digg clones, including at least these two that focus on Christian articles.
Blogs4God is the creation of Dean Peters, who also operates HealYourChurchWebsite.com. Dean has been working to develop a website that aggregates quality Christian blogs for years. There have been several previous iterations of the Blogs4God site, but none of them quite lived up to what he had envisioned. There were issues with articles espousing non-Christian beliefs, blogs that included some articles related to Christian issues but others that did not, and high quality blog articles sometimes got lost among lower quality articles.
The latest Pligg-based version of Blogs4God is less than a week old and still in beta, but the democratic nature of Pligg is cause for optimism that as a Biblical, discerning, and vigilant community grows at Blogs4God, it will cause quality Christian blog articles will rise to the top. Because Blogs4God has been around for years and Dean has developed friendships with many Christian bloggers, it has the reputation and connections that will help it to develop that community of users more quickly.
GospelShout is the creation of John Hamman of GospelLabs, LCC. The articles included on GospelShout are conventional news stories like you might find on traditional Christian news sites like Christian Post. Currently most of the articles appearing on the site are from One News Now and submitted automatically through an RSS feed. This was done to ensure fresh content is being added to the site while the community of users is still small and not submitting many articles manually.
With the explosion of Christian blogs and news stories that impact Christians, it is very difficult right now for Christians to find and keep up with the flood of new information. Both Blogs4God and GospelShout have the potential to help by providing a single website where Christians can go to read the top Christian blog articles and the most important Christian-related news articles.
Whether they succeed or not is completely dependent on their ability to attract a Biblical, discerning, and passionate community of Christians to submit, vote for, and comment on new articles on a daily basis.
I encourage you to check out both sites. Register and try them out. You can even vote for this article on both sites (Blogs4God vote, GospelShout vote) Then post your comments here.
Co-founder & CEO, OurChurch.Com
Paul has been the CEO of OurChurch.Com since its founding in 1996, combining his passion for faith and technology to lead the organization.
An accomplished writer, Paul has authored over 2,000 articles on faith and technology, featured on platforms like ChurchLeaders.com, The JoyFM, and his personal blog, LiveIntentionally.org.
Beyond his professional achievements, Paul serves as an elder at Journey Community Church and is deeply engaged in his community through his involvement with the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch and the Safety Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He is a contributing author of the book Outspoken! Conversations on Church Communication.
30 Comments
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Thanks for the Shout Paul!
Gospellabs does more than just post “news” stories, we have all sorts of categories to post in like Faith, Health, Entertainment, Men, Women, Family, etc.
Unfortunatly because we are in beta, we are short of non “news” stories. But I would love for visitors to submit other than news stories and blog posts! I personally hope to see more Faith based posts because they give us good testmonies and help increase our faith (its another way to encourage each other daily!).
Looking forward for more ourchurch.com sites to post too!
God Bless
Very well written.
Regards: Bernie Brisson
Simply the most excellent and readable analysis of the social bookmarking scene for Christians i’ve read to date
Thanks for taking the time to explain this so well to others
Dean
It is encouraging to see that, step by step, the Christian community’s voice starts to be heard on the www, too. The Web 2.0 opened many doors, so we’ll have to enter and take territories!
Blessings,
Zoltan Sebestyen, also known as Respiro
http://www.RespiroMedia.com
Oh — but there are more…here is my list.
* blogs4God
* Inbreaking
* NEW GospelShout
* Moral Metric
* Sermon Cloud
* Remarkable! (a product of Turtle Interactive)
* Spredd
http://www.turtleinteractive.com/article/semi-definitive-list-of-church-sector-web-20-applications
John and Dean, thanks for stopping by and posting comments.
Tim, thanks for posting a link to your list of Christian Web 2.0 sites. I’ll check it out.
Paul, no problemo … Just do me a favor? Don’t be a stranger …
… I always consider well researched and concise posts such as the one above compelling content …
… And I always want to highligt that!
In His Grace
D
Hi John, thanks for stopping by and letting us know about FaithTag.com. I am curious about a few things:
1) Were you aware of Blogs4God and GospelShout when you began developing FaithTag?
2) How do you envision FaithTag being distinct from the other two?
3) Since Digg-like sites take a critical mass of users, do you think there's enough room in the Christian news/bookmarking arena for all 3 to achieve the critical mass necessary to be successful?
– Paul
Another one has also come up: FaithTag.(www.faithtag.com) I think a Christian version of Digg is needed because Digg is tailored toward tech and news and its users are often not friendly toward Christians.