The WIRED article I tweeted about earlier,  where The Huffington Post is given the nod over The New York Times as a “News Site” (mainly because of it’s superior invitation to interact and read further) is a teaching moment for church related content on the Web. 

I was particularly struck by this observation:

Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable editorial technology, then, the NYT is sticking its head in the sand and retreating to a defensive stance of trying to make as much money as possible from its core loyal readers.

Why the New York Times Will Lose to The Huffington Post

What I see the Church doing is a step BELOW this,  and missing out on understanding its “core readers”.  I base this on an assumption that I represent a “core reader”. I am keenly interested in a Christian faith perspective on what is happening,  not only in my church,  but also in the world at large.  I have SOME interest in what my denomination’s leaders say about some of those world issues.  I am even more interested in what CHURCHES are doing to inform and enable  conversation and study in their congregations about what is going on in the world. 

We have in the Web and its rapidly growing suite of applications,  a move toward the social,  and I see the greatest possibilities in those tools so enabled to help us get a clearer picture  of what people in the church are saying and  doing. 

One of these “tools” is the growing presence of video as a “Social” media.  As of yet,  what is being produced for the Web is from a “network news” kind of approach.  A “national” , denominational “reporting” approach.  What we need to see is the development of online tools for enabling local churches to leverage all these social tools like video. 

What we also need to do is to begin the long overdue task of starting to think about a data taxonomy for a “Social Graph” that is built on the kind of theological categories and issues that church-centered people think about.  We have a need,  I think,  to “connect” on distinct categories of interests.  While the Facebooks of the world (or,  as it is,  THE Facebook)  “connect” us via common, popular categories ,  usually in popular media,  Churches have some unique “connecting tissues” that require us to build relational tables  of data that only our theological urges can devise.  When we do this,  we will have what I think will be  a compelling theological, “faith-driven” Social Graph that will leverage some of that”mojo” that Facebook has amassed in the secular  world,  and also for connecting church people according  to those categories that draw in the whole world ,  as Facebook does,  including many Christians.  And  once we’re on our way to building that (and like, Facebook,  it will “never be  finished”),  we can also hang some of our data connections off of those of Facebook (assuming  that the rest of the tech world gets from Facebook what they’re asking for,  which is more  and more “hooks” into the “fire hose” which is the Facebook API).

When we have rich interaction,  our system can “learn” from those  interactions.  I excitedly anticipate the day when we are on our way to sketching  together some theological relationships between stories and  issues,  and allowing that “tweaking” to grow the theological intelligence of  our data.  And that data can help us construct increasing amounts of attractive interactions and conversations.  I haven’t felt this “charged” about the possibilities for the Web since its very beginnings.  The success of Facebook and Twitter serve as witness to the hunger for feeling connected,  and hopefully,  we in the church can help move us from the “feeling of connectedness” to “increased connectedness”.  There’s probably a good theologically charged , technical word for that,  but I ‘m not quite sure what that might be (yet).