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Accepting Nominations for Top Internet Events Within Mormonism for 2005-2006

As a part of my upcoming Sunstone Presentation (The Promise and Peril of the Internet Within Mormonism), I hope to include a list of the Top Mormon Internet Events for 2005-2006. I would welcome any nominations from the bloggernacle at large. Some potential ideas might include….

Please let me know if you like any of these, or if you have any other nominations. I’d like to make this as interesting as possible.

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18 Responses

  1. There really was no “ldsblogs.org vs. ldselect.org”. DKL gave us a heads up long before launching and the two sites are not rivals in my opinion.

    I do think that the launch of bloggernacle portals have had a massive impact on the sense of community in the “bloggernacle” though. I think they have provided some real cohesion among a lot of Mormon blogs.

  2. Thanks Geoff. Actually, when I said “ldsblogs.org vs. ldselect.org”, I didn’t so much mean a battle, as much as I did the emergence of lds web aggregators/portals.

    Anyway, thanks for the nomination. If you have any additional anecdotal support for that, I’m all ears (I’m kinda out of that loop). Anything as fodder for my presentation will add color.

    Cheers!

  3. Hm. I guess I am not a very good internet Mormon as I didn’t know about several of the things that you posted.

    As far as I am concerned, the most important things are:

    1. The digitizaiton of Mormon Studies (JMH, Dialogue, BYU studies, etc.)
    2. General excellent content, whether posts or podcasts.
    3. Increased community

  4. Good stuff, J. Any pointers to BYU STudies or JMH? Also, any anecdotal stuff you can offer regarding increased community? Or stats or data or anything you’re comfortable sharing?

  5. https://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fjmh
    https://www.mhahome.org/pubs/journals_on_dvd.php
    https://www.lib.byu.edu/spc/byustudies/

    I would also add the UU’s Newspaper digitization effort:
    https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/unews/

    The updating of the Mormonstudies data base:
    https://mormonhistory.byu.edu/

    and Michael Hunter’s Mormon Studies page:
    https://mormonstudies.byu.edu/

    I’ll try to pull together real numbers for the size of the community

  6. I’m with Stapley. This may not be as definitive as the ones you’ve listed above, but it seems to me that the number of LDS who became aware of and began participating in Internet venues really exploded last year. Sunstone and Dialogue both put archival content online, I believe. Study groups (incl. Sunstone) began taking notice and having sessions on/about blogging. For example, the SoCal Miller Eccles Study Group, which regularly invites luminaries like Richard Dutcher, Richard Bushman, Armand Mauss, and Carol Lynn Pearson did a session on the Bloggernaccle a few months ago (and flew in prominent bloggers). Before 2005, few of my LDS friends had blogs, and now it seems like almost all of them post to a personal or community blog.

    Sorry that most of this evidence is anecdotal. I’m trying to find hard data, but the numbers are elusive.

  7. The church announced plans to digitize all of the microfilms in the vault, and to have volunteers index them. The index will be online, and when you find an entry you’re interested in the index, you’ll be able to click on it, and see the actual scan of the microfilm.
    https://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,40-1-3384-9,00.html
    This is huge news for the millions of folks who already use http://www.familysearch.org, or the actual microfilms. This might be the LDS internet news that got the most interest among folks who are not LDS.

  8. John, you are joking about Dan Peterson’s visit to the bloggernacle being significant aren’t you?

    For me, a far more significant event would be the posting of some of the old Tom Trails filmstrips:
    http://www.tomtrails.com

    :)

  9. In a bid to capture all of the ten top spots on your list for 2005-2006, I would like to mention that, besides visiting the bloggernacle, I also

    2) continued to post far too much at the FAIR boards
    3) had several articles published that were also posted to the web
    4) exchanged internet comments (some of them not altogether vicious) with numerous people
    5) sent e-mails to my elected representatives
    6) ordered books from Amazon
    7) occasionally read several newspapers and magazines on line
    8) ordered CDs on line
    9) arranged for hotels and airline tickets on line
    10) read on-line film reviews and purchased movie tickets on line

    Unfortunately, most of the details of these epoch-making events are lost to history. Had I realized their importance at the time, I would have maintained better records.

  10. Hey Dan,

    Welcome to Mormon Stories! I enjoy your wit.

    Say \”Hey\” to my cousin Dilworth for me, and the invitation is always open for you to come on the podcast to discuss your faith in Mormon origins (as a non-combative alternative to the mosaic painted by Grant Palmer).

    I have a lot of listeners who keep asking me, \”Why hasn\’t FAIR responded? Isn\’t there a conservative/apologist willing to speak openly/candidly in a non-controlled (by them) forum about Mormon origins?\”

    I publicly promise to be respectful. Even though I\’m outspoken about some apologetic tactics, I still share many of your goals, and seek to encourage faithfulness within Mormonism. I also respect your intent, and your intellect.

  11. John,

    Dan actually guested at T&S a couple years ago. He also has participated very occasionally on various posts, so there really is no story in him showing up at bcc to participate a while ago.

    But I wouldn’t mind knowing what Dan bought at Amazon…

  13. The (halfway done) transformation of LDS.org — not just in terms of the redo and the new content, but in this third reevaluation of the internet by the Church. At first there was the “oh, wait, there’s an internet? We ought to, um, have something there, I guess” phase, and then the “let’s buy every domain we can and put General Conference online” phase, and we’ve been moving swiftly to a content resource rivaling the Vatican (whose website rocks) and beating most US religious organizations I’ve bothered to visit (most of which are still stuck in “here’s a list of materials you can order for Religious Education classes” and “such-and-such made a speech, but we’re just going to give you a summary” land.)

    I mean, consider what’s available online now — much of which wasn’t there at all on January 1, 2005:

    — all the hymns and children’s songs in MP3, as well as in a format where you can transpose and rearrange as you like, and then print things out.
    — an online catalog where regular members can order things
    — .pdf and .html (or at least one of the two) full versions of all the scriptures, all the scripture stories, all the current manuals, and the Church magazines from 1972 forward. And .mp3 versions of all of them. And all of the CES materials. And most of it’s in Spanish, a lot of it’s in French, and more will be brought in for something like a dozen languages within the next year.
    — the various special topics sites (the one for investigators, the one for temples, the one for Joseph Smith…)

    Plus all the semi-official stuff from BYU and BYU Broadcasting.

    I mean, I don’t know about everyone else, but this has been something I’ve been hoping and praying for for years. Now we just need to gain Google supremacy over the anti-Mormons and things will be really awesome. If they could give me a setup so our YSA newsletter could be hosted at the church website and we could save on paper costs, well, that’d be like icing on the cake.

  14. I’ll give a vote for the FAIR wiki. I’ve been looking it over the last couple days and I have to say it is easily the best apologetic resource for LDS topics to date. I am quite surprised at how much content has been added just in the time since Lynch’s podcast interview when it was only something they were exploring.

    The nice thing about the wiki format is that it addresses the issues themselves, rather than speaking about the source of the criticism. In the end, attacking the source is only effective in deterring some folks from giving an ear to the issue… for a while. Eventually, people will hear the real issue and they need real responses. Kudos to FAIR on that one. They might as well just drop the message boards and do their credibility a favor (because regardless of wether or not the boards represent them, they host them and thus the attachment is unavoidable.)

  16. I make two nominations: LDSblogs vs LDSelect and Bannergate.

    But Geoff is right–the rivalry is a marketing ploy. I get along quite well with the guys over there. That said, my main motivation for creating LDSelect was the unfair way in which I felt their link-exchange policy was being enforced. But we agree to disagree about that.

    That said, would you mind putting up a link to ldselect?

    That is to be presented at the August symposium in Salt Lake City?

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