Archive for the 'Internet Content' Category

New Mormon Radio

David May 21st, 2009

The LDS Church made the following announcement on May 20 regarding a new internet radio service they launched.

We are pleased to announce that the Church has launched an official radio station called the Mormon Channel. The channel originates from Temple Square in Salt Lake City and broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Content for the station comes from the vast audio archives of the Church along with 20 new series created specifically for the station. The Mormon Channel also features programming from various partner organizations, including Deseret Book, Bonneville International, Deseret News, LDS Business College, and the campuses of Brigham Young University.

You can listen to the Mormon Channel live online anytime at radio.lds.org. There are also downloads and podcasts of content available at the same address.

In addition to online delivery, the channel is available on HDRadio in every Bonneville International radio market. Among those markets are Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Phoenix, and Seattle. Additionally, you will soon be able to listen via an iPhone application and a Mormon Channel widget. Other distribution options are currently being explored, including satellite radio and other mobile devices.

For LDS Church members who don’t live in areas where traditional Church broadcasts have been made available, this is a great new service and an excellent option for those who don’t have bandwidth which supports the streaming video during General Conference broadcasts.

Going to church made easier with Google Maps

David June 19th, 2008

LDS Maps siteThis week the LDS Church has launched a beta for the new meeting house locator at http://beta.maps.lds.org.    The current site at http://www.lds.org/basicbeliefs/meetinghouse has been adequate, but the new site utilizes both Microsoft and Google mapping technologies to provide the kind of mapping experience that most of us have come to expect from online maps.  Here are a few features that really seemed to stand out, beyond the expected address lookup, mapping, and directions:

  • Ability to switch between Google and Microsoft maps.  Some locations are more current with one map versus the other.
  • Ability to switch to Microsoft 3D view of the current location if Virtual Earth 3D is installed (also in beta)
  • Even if you don’t know the address or your address isn’t found, you can use your mouse to place a marker on the map to identify your location.
  • Not only will the application return the closest meeting locations, congregations and times, but it will provide a local contact name and number if you have questions.

I noticed a few bugs switching between maps, particularly when my connection was running slow, but for a beta launch it looks very promising!

LDS members encouraged to participate in online discussions

David April 24th, 2008

From ldswebguy comes a quote from Elder M. Russell Ballard, dated April 19, 2008, as presented to the Brigham Young University Management Society in Washington, D.C.,

If a national conversation is going on about the Church, are you going to be an active participant or a silent observer?

Church leaders must not be reluctant to participate in public discussion. Where appropriate, we will engage with the media whether it’s the traditional, mainstream media or the new media of the Internet. But Church leaders can’t do it all, especially at the grass-roots, community level. While we do speak authoritatively for the Church, we look to our responsible and faithful members to engage personally with blogs, to write thoughtful, online letters to news organizations, and to act in other ways to correct the record with their own opinions.

I think that it is amazing how far the LDS Church has come with regards to the use of technology and in particular in how it encourages internet use.  Those of us who have been involved in technology has seen the potential for years, but now it is really hitting the mainstream church members.  It has become not only an accepted channel, but one of the primary channels for communicating to the public about what we as a Church believes.

Miss your favorite Conference speaker? You don’t have to wait until the May Ensign or Liahona.

David April 6th, 2008

I posted an article on Thursday regarding the multimedia options available for the LDS community.  While the streaming video technology is still relatively new, video, audio, and transcription downloads are readily available within a short time of their original presentation.  The "official" transcription from lds.org takes a few days because it is reviewed for spelling and grammar, since this becomes the permanent record of the talk.  Here are a few resources available for obtaining Conference talks:

  • Deseret News (local newspaper) - summaries of each talk, audio & text transcripts
  • KSL Television - video, audio, and news stories related to LDS community
  • LDS.org - official site for LDS Church General Conference, includes video, audio, and transcripts. 

As an aside for those who really enjoy listening to the inspiring music between talks, the download files for individual talks at LDS.org don’t include the music, but the full sessions do.  If you use an MP3 editing tool, you can extract just the music and save them to separate MP3 files.  When the General Conference audio files are released on CD to LDS Distribution Centers, you can also use these to save the music to separate files.  (I haven’t compared the differences between these to see how the quality of download vs CD files compare)

[EDIT] Here is an open source utility which can split MP3 files without decoding them.  Since the audio is encoded when it creates the original MP3 file, if your utility decodes it first before splitting it, there will be a loss in quality of the recording.
I have heard from some people who have compared the CDs of Conference with the MP3 files, and they have said that the CD quality is much higher.  That makes sense, since most downloads are created at a reduced bit rate to reduce the download size.

Growing multimedia content offers more options for LDS community

David April 3rd, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I have been surprised lately with the availability of online multimedia content.  I’m not just talking about the popularity of YouTube with user-contributed content or downloading music from the Apple iTunes Store.  I’m talking about traditional media entities offering professionally written content on their web sites. Radio stations such as National Public Radio (NPR) not only have recorded podcasts of their broadcasts, but regularly suggest additional content for their listeners to find on their web site.  Do you hate missing the KSL Greenhouse Show on Saturdays?  Like many other sites, you don’t have to miss it if you subscribe to a podcast on the station web site.  Offering a mix of traditional and new media sources, here are the top sources for online news, ranked by the number of visitors (from Ars Technica):

  1. Yahoo News
  2. MSNBC
  3. CNN
  4. AOL News
  5. New York Times
  6. Gannett
  7. ABC News
  8. Google News
  9. USA Today
  10. CBS News

While most of these sites are offering short video and/or audio clips, some media sites are now offering premium content that they normally reserve for television or radio (together with new advertising).  Did anyone see the NCAA Basketball finals on CBS.com?  Did you miss seeing who was eliminated from American Idol on Fox?  (you can also see their recent performances on their web site) 

BYU televisionMost of these sites are using Adobe Flash streaming technology (like YouTube), but others are starting to use HD video plugins such as those created by American Fork, Utah company, Move Networks, including ABC, Discovery, FOX, ESPN, and Oprah.com.  BYU Television, also using Move Networks’ HD video plugin, is one of the first stations that has around the clock broadcasting content on their site.  In comparison, the lds.org site will host transcripts, video, and audio downloads of LDS General Conference once they become available, but BYU.tv promises to include live HD video of for all morning and afternoon sessions.  LDS Church members in Utah may not appreciate how rare it is to be able to watch Conference in your own home around the world as it is being broadcast. 

Footnote more than just another site indexing scanned documents

David March 26th, 2008

FootnoteLindon, Utah based Footnote launched January 2007 and has grown to become a favorite resource for avid genealogists. What makes them different from other sites like Ancestry or WorldVitalRecords is it’s expanded resources beyond traditional records. For example,

Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.

It is the extra steps that they have taken from public data which we already had access to, but correlating it and indexing it that makes this a unique resource.

Using open standards lets the community redesign your site ;-)

David March 25th, 2008

LibraryThing designA scary thought… letting anonymous users on the internet redesign the look of your web site. But the folks over at LibraryThing are doing that very thing. Well, almost. They are letting user submit proposed designs so that they can be reviewed by the internal development staff.

So far, some two dozen members have contributed CSS stylesheets and one, zanix, produced a highly original design, executed entirely in Photoshop. MarkBarnes, acting on a suggestion from Abby, produced a very attractive design, based on the design of Cork’d, “LibraryThing for wine.” All told, there have been some really interesting ideas, and fetching new color palates. I’m still not sure where to take the design, but it’s given me a lot to think about. (It’s certainly pointed out some structural problems with our mark-up too.)

I don’t know how many active users are over there, but they have collectively submitted over 25 million books to their collective virtual book shelves. This goes to show that when you have built the right kind of community for your site, you can get all kinds of feedback and contribution back to the community.

So what does this mean for you?  If you take the time to design your web site from the ground up using standards based HTML and CSS (even if you just have a blog site), it will pay off many times over when you need to make minor changes to your design.  All of the popular PHP open source projects have taken this to heart, making it easy to create themes associated with their products.  (For example, there are literally hundreds of WordPress themes available to download for free use or purchase.)

Don’t be afraid. If you chat with the missionaries online you’re still in control.

David March 22nd, 2008

LDS logoIt is amazing what good a language like Java can do in the hands of the right people. I am acquainted with the Java developers who created the mormon.org site, but even the best software is a hollow shell without a great design and content.

When I lived in Oregon a few years ago, I had friends who when they found out that I was a Mormon, treated me differently… as if I had contracted some bizarre disease that was contagious if they got too close to me. These are the kind of people that wouldn’t answer the door if the missionaries rang their doorbell. But if they are curious enough about what makes us tick, they will want to find out more. That is where the information found at mormon.org is so powerful. From the safety of their own internet connection, they can hear the pure testimony of others like them who have found some glorious truths in the Mormon faith. Did you know that they can even chat online with missionaries? It isn’t available 24 hours a day since it is staffed with missionaries from the Provo, Utah Missionary Training Center, but they can chat from 7am to 10:30pm Mountain Standard Time.

FamilySearch offers online training for consultants and leaders

David March 22nd, 2008

FamilySearch logoAs a family history consultant, this morning I attended a training class offered by the Salt Lake Family History Center on the new FamilySearch (NFS) site. Rather than offering a complete site training, this was more of an introduction to the site features and the training resources that are available.

To access the available training as a family history consultant or priesthood leader, each person must register at the appropriate site. General church membership will have to wait until NFS is available in their temple district. The general public will have to wait until NFS 1.0 is released (delivery date hasn’t been announced). Note that to register, you will need your membership number, confirmation date, and unit number.

You will be notified within a few days once your registration has been validated, and you will have access to role-specific training at https://lds.netdimensions.com. Within 90 days of the NFS being made available in your area, you will be notified via email to register and begin additional training at http://new.familysearch.org.

LDS Church archives to become the Google Books of genealogical records

David March 21st, 2008

FamilySearch logoLast night I attended the Utah Java Users Group (UJUG) meeting and heard a presentation by senior developers and leadership from the LDS Church FamilySearch Digital Pipeline teams. I believe that it is certainly worth mentioning.

To give you a little background…

If you haven’t had a chance to see how the Google Books indexing project is coming along, take a look. They are taking scanners into university libraries across the US and scanning and indexing the full text. Not all of this is searchable online because of copyright issues but nevertheless huge number of books are now available because the copyright is out of date or because the publisher has granted Google rights to make them available.

The LDS Church has been scanning historical documents since the 1930s onto microfilm and microfiche and stored them at the Granite Mountain Vault for safekeeping. Now they are digitizing these scanned records as well as digitizing other records as they become available.

FamilySearch Indexing

With the newest scanning technology, they anticipate being able to completely scan all documents in the vault in 8 to 10 years. With terabytes of digitized images of censuses, birth / marriage / death certificates, and other records, the next step is to index this data. The technology for automatic indexing of handwritten documents is still not ready for production use but when you have an army of 130,000+ volunteers, you can utilize the strengths of technology to present the necessary information quickly and use the strengths of individuals to identify handwritten text. Doing so, they have been able to index up to 500,000 names per day. This includes double entry (two separate extractors) and arbitration if the data doesn’t match perfectly.

The Granite Mountain Vault isn’t the only digital data that is being processed by this program. Several US states have donated their records to the Family History Department to scan and preserve their data. The LDS Church is under negotiations with other public entities to extend the records that will be available. If you want to participate in this program, go to http://familysearchindexing.org. Don’t worry, they won’t run out of work for you to do any time soon!

FamilySearch Record Search

Although this isn’t open for public beta yet (summer 2008) all of the records that these volunteers are indexing are already available at http://search.labs.familysearch.org. They have developed Rich Internet Applications (RIA) utilizing a RESTful Web Services framework running on Java and open source technologies. They are building a highly scalable, parallel architecture to handle 100 requests per second (currently handling 80/sec). The presenter, Rob Edwards, said that in early negotiations with a 3rd party development company who supports eBay Japan (their architecture handles 3 requests per second) walked away from negotiations because they didn’t believe that their technology would handle so many more transactions.

They didn’t say this, but in a competitive work environment I’m sure that many companies are trying to recruit developers from these teams because they have been able to solve problems top companies are currently facing. Did I say that they are hiring?

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