Updated December 24, 2006

Leading the field

Virtual communities are more effective and useful to large organizations than blogs alone. The software we use to drive them supports a feature-rich environment which includes moderated comments and special services.

Virtual communities are as au courant as the blogosphere and older than the World Wide Web. The term was apparently coined in Howard Rheingold's book "Tools for Thought," published in 1985.

We helped the Biblical Recorder launch a virtual community service. Shortly after launch, their keystone blog, the Editor's Journal, was featured by Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics.

Powered in the beginning by a SouthernConnections-customized version of Roller, their service's features thus far include:

• User blogs, each with its own user-selected appearance ("skin"). User blogs are promoted on the Journal's front page. The most recently accessed user blogs are listed in the right-hand column of the front page, with the approximate number of daily page views.
• Baptist Planet (refined from Web Buzz), a site-specific aggregation of blogs and news sites which are of interest to the Biblical Recorder audience.
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• Blog It! links:
  Biblical Recorder articles all feature a "Blog It" button:
  
  Thus readers are invited to comment via their own blogs, or to add their comments to existing blogs.
• Moderated comments: Editor's Journal comments are all moderated, and have been since the community was launched by then-Editor Tony Cartledge. Current Editor Norman Jameson continues the policy by moderating comments filed in response to his posts.
  Other bloggers on the site are responsible for moderating comments filed in response to their blog posts.

The site began with and continues to have broad reach. When it was just one week old, the Editor's Journal attracted attention from Czechoslovakia. -->One entry was translated and re-posted to more than one server in that region.

That translation inspired an editorial cartoon.

The cartoon is a user-created work of opinion journalism.

It should be clear then that the Biblical Recorder has established itself as something of a pioneer among publications which welcome user involvement in creation of the online publication, an approach which benefits the publication and serves the readers well.

Southern Connections is among those who find the evidence compelling that such reader/user involvement is required of all newspaper and newspaper-like publications that wish to survive in the wired/broadcast world. We recommend against walled gardens and see outside-site linking as an inescapable fundamental.

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