YouVersion! That's right. YouVersion. Not YourVersion, but YouVersion. Kinda odd, but let's not let that stop us... YouVersion was started up by LifeChurch.tv. I feel that LifeChurch.tv needs some more introduction. I'm not that well acquainted with it, but as I have come to understand it, poking around on their website, it's an actual church with more than 10 locations or something. The churches are so spread out that they are all connected by satellite and internet in some way (exactly how they're connected that way...that's not really clear to me yet... They do put their sermons online...). The odd thing is that their brick-and-mortar churches are also called "LifeChurch.tv"--.tv?! I don't understand the reasoning for a physical church to have a ".tv" attached to its name when "Life Church" would be good enough... Anyway--
The thing about LifeChurch.tv is that it runs an "online church." Internet church sounds a bit odd to me, and for me to share more of my opinions about it would be an entirely different post. Ultimately, whatever floats people's boats is my so, so, so short answer (an answer that I almost don't want to give at all). So LifeChurch.tv is very internet savvy, and so they were able to make YouVersion, a free online Bible that connects you to other believers, allowing you to connect through shared links, videos, and comments, all centered the individual's selected Bible verse(s).
As with any other Web 2.0 app, this means signing up for an account. I know how to do that! Check! And now... The Bible Reader. Either I'm not that smart, or it's not that intuitive, or it just doesn't work that well, but the reader takes some getting used to. It says:
You can begin by selecting, then tagging (I failed at the first (which was the basis to the second and third). For your information,) or starring (
) content that resonate with your studies.
Just tap the text and it will select/highlight the entire verse in yellow for you. It took me a while to figure it out. So sad.
To the right of the reader is what I like to call "the Content Tabs" (I just made that up because I didn't know how to refer to it in my post). The first tab of these "Content Tabs," the "Community" tab, brings you to other people's activity surrounding the highlighted verse. Most common are "thoughts"/notes--theological notes, historical notes, "btw" notes, "i love this!" notes, devotional notes... Besides notes, members of the community may attach/upload links to other websites, videos, images, and coming soon, vlogs and audio.
The next tab is the archive for your own uploaded content. It's nice that there is the option of making your own content private or public. However public and community-y you choose to use this website by utilizing YouVersion's Web 2.0-ness (its "Web 2.0-ness" being its ability to link to many different types of things), YouVersion, in my opinion, is more immediate and useful than Delicious bookmarking--at least for Bible study related stuff. See, I could bookmark an article from a website that really makes me go, "Ahh.." about Genesis 1:1 through Delicious and look through my tags at Delicious whenever I wanted to find it, or I could just more directly link it to the actual Bible with YouVersion, and look at "my contributions" on YouVersion where all my other related Bible study content are also located. (es, post-its in the physical Bible book would work, too, but then everything gets lumpy and the post-it covers other parts of text...) YouVersion seems pretty cool, but I need to poke around it a bit more to see if I'd really stick with it.
But no more time for poking around--I'm getting sleepy, and while I'd love to talk to you more about YouVersion, I'd rather talk to God about other things... Good night!
--kowai-kawaii
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