You Version—a new way to read the bible together
There are plenty of places to read the bible online—the BibleGateway being about the best. But now there is YouVersion, a completely fresh Web 2.0 approach to engaging with the ancient texts, in community.
Bible in Community?
YouVersion is essentially an online bible reader, that allows you to tag and mark parts of the text and link it to other content such as images, videos, links or just plain old text. The unique feature of YouVersion, is the way this content is shared with other users.
And if you like the way others engage with the text you can become their “followers”, and keep track of their contributions.
Collaboration???
I really love the concept, and the interface has a nice feel to it (even if it is Flash), but I’m not sure it quite hits the mark in terms of collaboration yet. Users can post as much content as they like, but the only response other users can make to their postings is to rate the content out of five.
True collaboration would allow multiple users to edit content, or at least comment more fully, rather like the Wikipedia approach. As it stands it will become no more than a library of people’s individual ideas about what the bible says; and we all know where that leads us! Rather than just read John Piper’s sermons and Matthew henry’s commentaries, which are readily available elsewhere, true collaboration would allow users to build upon and improve their words and insights.
More please
To be fair it is still in Beta and the user base is still quite small, much of the content being LifeChurch videos (the owners), or common public domain texts like Schofield and Henry (I’m sure we could manage without these two, since they exist in hundreds of other places). There are also various features not yet available in the current Beta version, such as the ability to create and join groups. So I look forward with much anticipation to seeing these new features.
But don’t take my word for it, give it a go. It’s a great concept, and if YouVersion doesn’t make it work, they’ve raised the bar for someone else to go at.
