The people behind the Many Eyes data visualization site recently pointed us to a minute-long YouTube video of someone playing around with the New Testament social network data we posted in January. The person clicks around the visualization. and makes some observations about how hard it is to find someone without a connection to Jesus.
Thanks, johnkoetsier, for taking the time to make and upload this video!
William at Weedon’s Blog shares his thoughts on the ESV in a liturgical (Lutheran) context:
We’ve been using the Lectionary for LSB [Lutheran Service Book] now for over a year, and this employs the ESV text. I confess that there are times I still stumble. My old ear is trained to KJV and I suspect it always will be. But I’ve grown quite fond of the ESV. It’s rather faithful (though no version is perfect, including the Authorized Version!), and yet it seems to speak an English that most folks will have little trouble understanding…. In use for over a year now, I can honestly say it strikes me as a good liturgical text. It is a text that is dignified and yet accessible, and as the icing on the cake, it still seems to be overwhelmingly similar to the “flow” of the KJV…)
The comments even manage to stay mostly on-topic and add value to the conversation—a rarity when discussing Bible versions.
Last month Crossway published a press release that mentions the iPhone ESV site you learned about here first. It also discussed a few statistics:
The main ESV Bible web site receives over 100,000 unique visitors a month, up from 1,000 visitors a month when it launched in July 2002. Over the past five years, Crossway has led innovation in Internet access to the Bible. Key events include:
- February 2003: Crossway launches a Bible web service API, allowing other web sites to display the ESV text on their sites and create innovative “mashups.”
- July 2003: Crossway makes the ESV available as an RSS feed, becoming the first Bible publisher to embrace RSS.
- April 2005: Crossway begins the ESV Bible Blog, which is regularly updated with news and links about the ESV.
- January 2006: Crossway allows people to hear any verse or combination of verses in the ESV streamed over the Internet. This feature is still unique among Bible web sites, which typically require listening to complete chapters from the Bible, not individual verses.
- May 2006: Crossway launches its first mobile-friendly web site.
- May 2006: Crossway makes its devotions available in iCal format for integration with Google Calendar.
Crossway just published another press release that discusses an iPhone book-browsing application. It lets you browse and search the full text of many of Crossway’s most-recent books. Try it at http://www.crossway.org/m.
Today we have an interview with Tim Kimberley, one of the people behind BibleMap.org. BibleMap.org is an ESV/Google Maps mashup we previously wrote about in January. Keep up with the latest developments at the BibleMap.org Blog. Thanks to Tim for letting us interview him!
The purpose of the site is to very simply connect every location in the Bible with Google maps. I was reading my Bible one morning and came across a location I had never heard of before. I grabbed one of my Bible atlases off the shelf and looked in the index and the location wasn’t in the index. I grabbed another atlas and the location wasn’t there either. I realized Bible atlases have publication requirements and aren’t able to be exhaustive. I began wondering if I could bring together a site which would be very simple yet powerful and exhaustive.
I have probably put about 200 hours into the project so far. I designed the site completely in Adobe Photoshop CS3. I wanted it to have a simple/clean look so I wanted to just focus on the looks before turning to implementation. The implementation of the site was done completely through Dreamweaver CS3. The guts of the site is PHP with a MySql database. I like PHP and MySql because it is so inexpensive to get up and running. A digital Bible was provided by the fine ESV folks and the Bible locations, images and descriptions were all donated or already open to use. The majority of the work was writing PHP code to hook up all the functionality of the site and then to generate all the files the site would use. When users are going through the site, they never touch the database; it’s all cached and generated files. I use AJAX to get all the data and use either included html files in some cases and JSON javascript files in other situations.
Some of my favorite functionality which I always hope people see are all the photos and descriptions associated with locations. For example, if you select Acts 18 and then click on Athens there are many photos attached to Athens which show the area from the ground. The site currently has about 400 photos awaiting discovery.
I am working to double the locations we currently have hooked up through the site. I have gained access to many more locations which will hopefully continue to get the site as exhaustive as possible. We are getting close to being as exhaustive as modern biblical research will allow. We are also working to greatly increase the photos associated with each location. We currently have about 400 photos in the site, yet we have over 6,000 photos at our disposal. So we are working to get the site saturated with these photos.
While not working on the site I am finishing up a Master of Theology (Th.M.) degree at Dallas Theological Seminary. I also design the Dallas Seminary website (www.dts.edu) and I also design and develop www.helives.com (new site coming online September 1st, 2007). My wife and I are involved with our local church and thoroughly enjoy our two little children.
We’ve released eight new spots in the “Bible for Life” radio campaign. Each one-minute spot has someone reading a passage from the ESV and meditating on it.
This month features John Ensor, Nick Gonzales from Salvador, one about Charles Finney, and others.
Listen to all the spots at www.bibleforlife.org.
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