LDS Media Talk

See two MormonAds from the New Era magazine made into short video clips:

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See the Church’s new Web site for youth centered around the New Year’s celebration!

Go to the Web site A Brand New Year.

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Mormon Magz reminds us that the New Era Web site offers an MP3 download of the Christmas song “Little Baby,” which appears as sheet music in the December issue of the New Era. An instrumental version is also available for those who want to sing along.

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I was reading some internal Church research recently regarding challenges most bishops face. One that caught my attention was that many bishops struggle to truly know their ward members. I don’t doubt this is true, but the statement did concern me in the context of some other research I did last August regarding a Church Web site feature that could help bishops better get to know their ward members.

Last summer, I did some analysis of the Stake and Ward Web sites statistics, and I found that 60% of wards have no member photos posted. A small percentage of units, 5%, mostly singles wards, are heavy users of this feature with over 100 photographs posted of the members of the ward.

I have never been a bishop, so perhaps there is something I am missing, but I would like to understand this better. Am I right that the photo feature of the Ward Web site would help bishops put names to faces? I know bishops want more than a name and a face, but isn’t that a good start?  Is there something impeding more bishops from utilizing this feature? If you are or have been a bishop, what could we do through the Church Web site to help you in your effort to get to know the members of you ward better?

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Web users, in general, want fresh content, therefore it is typically the new sites or new postings on  the site that get the most traffic. LDS.org is no different and, not surprisingly, traffic spikes around General Conference time as members are hungry to feast upon the latest words from our living prophets. In the weeks after conference, archived talks remain among the most popular items on LDS.org. Through the end of October, there were over 1.2 million downloads of October 2008 General Conference talks.

In this instance “downloads” has a specific meaning, which I will explain, but you will see that the 1.2 million figure is actually a conservation estimate. By download, I don’t necessarily mean that the talk was saved to the user’s hard-drive, merely that the talk was read, watched or listened to. I have de-duplicated the figures, meaning that if the same person downloaded the same content multiple times, I only count it once. I also wanted to include the numbers from people watching archived content on the Move player, the new interactive video player the Church is using. Since the Move player is tracked differently, I had to do some additional finagling, but again, I erred on the conservative side and simply took unique visitors to the page. Bottom line, the actual number of archived talks read/listened to/watched is probably much higher than my 1.2 million, conservative estimate.

In the charts below, you will see various breakouts of the 1.2 million downloads of October 2008 General Conference archived content. The numbers are through the end of October.

Summary By Format: Read/Watch/Listen

Summary By Technology

Summary By Session

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Check out the new scripture mastery section of the Seminary site. It has activities that will help you become more proficient in finding, understanding, applying, and memorizing the seminary mastery scriptures.

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Did you know that LDS.org is the 3,095th most popular site on the Internet?

More precisely, it has an Alexa ranking of 3,095. Although Alexa is not a precise indicator of Web traffic, it is helpful in comparing Web sites in an imperfect world of metrics.

Other Alexa rankings:
   mormon.org is 63,314
   familysearch.org is 11,342

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The popular printed books with colorfully illustrated scripture stories are now available online: Book of Mormon Stories, Doctrine and Covenants Stories, Old Testament Stories, and New Testament Stories.

Each of the four books is available online in downloadable text, audio, and video formats. These are written on a basic reading level for children and are also a valuable resource for others who may not yet be familiar with the standard works. The Church has also released a video version (not animated) of the books on a new DVD set.

Consider getting the printed books or the DVD set as Christmas gifts for children.

How helpful is it to your family for the Church to provide the HTML, PDF, MP3, and downloadable video formats, in addition to the printed books and DVD formats?

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English text of all the sessions from the recent LDS General Conference is now available online.

Read more information about audio, video, and non-English text.

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Have you checked out some of the recent online offerings from the New Era?

• The New Era has posted a video promoting its October issue, which is a special issue on the pamphlet For the Strength of Youth. Check out the video, and get a glimpse of this special issue.
•  The New Era home page has downloadable MP3 recordings of the song “Steadfast and Immovable” whose sheet music appears in the October issue.
• The New Era is also conducting an online survey on dating with questions like “In your opinion, what is the difference between dating and hanging out?” and “In your opinion, what makes somebody a ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’?” Come on, teens, voice your opinions!

Read the Mormon Magz blog to keep up with the latest about Church magazines.

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The LDS Church magazines are begining to post galleries of images to enhance articles in the Liahona, Ensign, New Era, and the Friend.

• The New Era has posted a gallery of photos from the article “From Generation to Generation“ in the September issue. The article centers on two teenage members of a family in Guatemala. They tell the story of a hard-working family trying to pass along important life skills to the next generation.
• The Friend’s Web site has posted a slideshow of “Our Creative Friends” drawings from the September issue.
• You can always find the gallery of Mormonads from the New Era organized by topic.
• And the Friend coloring pages are also online by topic.