Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Koinonia Blog, Firefox addons, Go!Animate, Bible on Blackberry, Webon

Koinonia Blog
A new blog sponsored by Zondervan has been started recently with the goal of encouraging "biblical-theological conversations for the community of Christ." It is a group blog with a list of contributors of whom you will probably recognize many. Check out the "Monday with Mounce" series on translation of the Greek NT. Part of their self-description includes:

Chiefly—and you may have already picked this up from
the name of our blog—we want to build real koinonia, community by intimate
participation. We think the conversations here, though digital, will impact the
community of Christ. They will be appropriate for the academy, church, and
coffeehouse.
Looks like they have other some other interesting stuff planned as well. (HT: Euangelion)

Firefox addons

Iyov has updated his list of Firefox addons and other ways he is customizing Firefox.

Go!Animate

I keep looking for ways to 're-present' the biblical stories. Go!Animate is a quick, free, and easy way to create animations. HERE is an example I put together in less than 5 minutes of an old classroom joke... (HT: Jane's)

Bible on your Blackberry

OliveTree announced a beta version of their BibleReader for the Blackberry. (Laridian also has the tools for Bible study on a Blackberry.)

Webon
Webon provides "smart website publishing for free." It really is incredibly easy to get a website up and running in no time. It's hosted for free on their server. They have "kits" that provide templates to get you started. There are some limits to the free version, but you can go pretty far. [HT: PCWorld]

2 comments:

  1. This is partially about Koinonia, but mostly about blogs in general. Any thoughts on what's going to replace blogs? I have been reading most of my blogs through Google Reader although I sometimes use Sage Reader as well. Generally I read a post within the first 12 hours its been posted, but generally much quicker than that. Rarely do I actually visit the blog website since I'm using a reader. Unless you're running the actual blog or dedicated enough to keep returning to old blog posts, I don't see a lot of good interaction happening with blogs. I consider that to be the nail in the blog coffin, if blogging is meant to foster better discussion. If blogging is more a storage place for thoughts or resources I suppose it's less of a concern, but the more blogs I have to keep track of, the less time I spend in any one blog lately.

    I know the blogging solution is to allow blogger to email you follow up comments, but I have yet to get in that habit. Plus if there turns out to be an important discussion in a comment thread in which I haven't commented, I'm still out of the loop there.

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  2. I know exactly what you mean, Michael. I use Google Reader too, and I am trying hard to keep it manageable despite the fact that I keep adding new stuff to read. I've become fairly good at scanning and not reading. (That doesn't sound good. There was a blog posting on that very issue!) If I want to follow up on comments, I either leave the post marked as unread or I 'star' it so that I can come back to it later.
    In the big picture of things, I think you are right in that blogs can only do so much. Maybe something more wiki-like where you can the activity more easily... For myself, if someone adds a comment to one of my blog posts that is important, I update and edit the post itself to make sure it gets noticed, but this still doesn't help in the Reader if you viewed it before the update.

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