Joshua Porter wrote an interesting article early last month entitled “Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content.”
It’s a very interesting article about how content aggregators (search engines, blogs, news sites, links pages, etc. - virtually any form of website or software which gathers content from other digital sources and presents them in an aggregated fashion) are changing the way people receive information, and I would strongly encourage you to read the entire article. I’m going to touch on one point he made and how it possibly relate to church websites, but I think the whole article has some very important things to say to us as Christian webmasters.
Here is an excerpt which I found especially compelling:
Aggregation hinges on gathering content from other domains. This dramatically affects the search for content. Users no longer need to start their search in the domain where the content lies. In fact, they almost never do.
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
