This is a great post by Dave Winer.  (Find me stuff I’m interested in) As I often do,  I start thinking about how his insights could be so valuable for the church in their efforts to find their way in the online world.   The “Social Media” goes way beyond Facebook.  It is taking place wherever “Social” is a part of the formula to handle presentation and data.  And what Dave expresses here is a long standing desire of mine re: the way the church could get people to help us all discover how to bundle all of our interests together to produce a very smart, theological system, because  of the fact that the customers/users have interests that are theological.

When I worked on the project for the online bookstore,  we had selected MS Site Server as the software platform (this was 1998).   One of the things in Site Server that motivated me to recommend that platform was its inclusion of a feature that presented “People who bought X(this product) also bought y (these other products)”.   I was furious when I realized that our contractor/programmers had written around this feature.  Basically chopped it out.  And no one would listen to me.  A major obstacle was that we also had insufficient relational data about the products.  And we had also purchased ,  in those same weeks and months that we were building the  store, what was already an outdated backend order processing system that was not even compliant with SQL Server or ODBC.   My warnings there also fell on deaf ears.  I could not convince them that we needed to give attention to building joins between product data and “categories”.   The result was a system that did not  know how  to tell the customer that there were related products to the one they were buying.  They did this even with individual volumes  of reference series’.   Years down the road,  they began to notice how stupid this was,  and linked “sets” together.  But much of my early work in building relational tables to connect these kinds of obvious connections was discarded.

Without the proper priority given to relational data,  their social functions were screwed from the get-go.  There was never an  interest there  in how to connect the people who bought the products,  and allow them to simply discuss  the resources.  When you consider that Christian Education is constantly looking for resources for its teachers,  and that people love  to debate the merits of one book or resource over  another,  and delve  into theological approaches,  this lack of exploration into how to  do online community was simply crazy.  And they STILL don’t do this.  There are no discussions connected to this bookstore that are accessible on the bookstore site.  And there are no signs of any social media in connection with the site. Still.  Today.  Unbelievable.

Christian resources (books, Bibles, teaching aids,  commentaries,  etc.) are a rich source of interaction and engagement (or they SHOULD be).  And the potential to mine valuable links in the effort to build a recommendation engine is such an important discovery for us to make,  and go from there to start devoting time and resources to thinking about “socializing” our data.  Our data is not only the products in bookstores,  but we are now discovering that “activity streams” are important.  But the church has yet to discover  this.  We have,  I would say,  pretty important “activity streams”.   We SHOULD be recognizing their importance.  It is our bread and butter.  To mine the social media landscape by building our theological activity streams is crucial to our stewardship of new technology.

I SOOOO want to discover an audience for thinking about these things.  I have  now worked for two denominational agencies that I was unable to convince of these things.  The fact that I am no longer working for either  of them is testimony to the fact that they don’t get social media data issues.  If they did,  they would be able to see the obvious value I I represent in terms of church and technology.  Facebook has succeeded because of relational data done in unique way that has drawn millions to the power of those overt connections. They are overt in that they are rather obvious, popular culture “things in common” interests,  but no one had ever taken these and injected them into site navigation in such a user friendly manner.  We need to think in the church about how we might learn from some reverse engineering of that model,  and in that learning,  discover the formula for building out theological connections.

In the final few months of my last job,  I was trying to describe why we should be concerned about the social media data in You Tube videos.  When I left,  that work was abandoned.  And the part of the site that was a major area of responsibility for me,  and where the YouTube  data issues were most important ,   has not been further developed.

That audience HAS to be  out here somewhere.  For the  past couple of years,  I cannot get anyone to delve into it with me.  And that is an absolute loss for the church.  I KNOW it.  I simply have to move further out onto the Web and begin searching for church related folks who are thinking about such things. This may sound bombastic and conceited,  but I am convinced that I know something that others  need to know about social data, social graph,  and social media.

Dave,  if you’re reading,  it IS a great idea for a startup. For the church,  it is something on which we need to GET STARTED.

Scripting News: “Find me stuff I’m interested in”