When I started the weekly bracha last year, I didn’t put much thought to it, just started on a whim without much fanfare.
But the brachas have morphed into a staple of this blog; “The Kineti blog? Oh, that Messianic link aggregator blog, sure, I know it.”
The brachas are something of worth to the Messianic community, IMO, shining light on those great gems from the Messianic blogosphere each week. Proud of this work. I consider it a positive contribution to the Messianic community.
I’ve had some good feedback on the brachas, too, I’m really happy with the beast that the weekly bracha has become.
But there are some problems:
- Stitching together a blog post from all the links takes about an hour or more. I love reading the posts, but it’s boring plumbing work stitching together a bracha list. The bracha post should be automated.
- It’s limited to my Intarweb® Line of Sight. That is, the bracha contains gems only from the blogs I follow. The bracha should be democratized.
- The Kineti blog is overwhelmed with brachas! The bracha should move onto its own website.
Collecting good links over the week is easy: I use Google Reader to tag Messianic blog gems, and if I run into good stuff outside my Circle of Blogs®, I use good ol’ fashioned bookmarks.
This works, but it’s a bit of friction.
The real hard part is narrowing down the list, stitching together a post with commentary on each post, proper formatting, quotes, tags, ranking order, all that good jazz.
And while I follow hundreds of Messianic, Christian, and Jewish blogs, the world is a big place – the bracha could be better, tastier, bigger, longer, uncut. Ahem.
Ch..Ch..Changes
I’m planning a few changes that will open up the weekly bracha and make it awesome(r) for you fine blog readers:
- Crowdsourcing the bracha: I’ll have a website up soon where anyone can submit a link, description, optional quote, tags, and rank. Submitting it will go into a database for approval.
- Automated posting service: I’d write a piece of software that takes all the submitted links, stitches together the descriptions, titles, tags, all that jazz, into a proper HTML document, publishes it to the blog, and sends an automated tweet announcing the bracha to the vast peoples of the intarwebz.
- Dedicated website? And posts show up immediately, rather than weekly? (More on this in a moment.)
Initially, I’ll use the service myself – giving me instant karma: automated stitching together of the links, automated posting to the blog, making the bracha posts punctual, and saving me hours each week. Pure genius!
And over time, I hope some of you fine blog readers will contribute links to the bracha. Got a great post relevant to the Messianic world? Submit it to the bracha submission site. Want to promote something you wrote that you think is totally rock hard awesome (and relevant)? Submit it to the bracha submission site. Submit to the bracha! Obey your master! Master!
Ahem.
One last thing
The major change I’m considering is moving the weekly bracha onto its own dedicated website. Something like Digg or Reddit, only for Messianic and related items.
If the bracha has its own website, and the content is generated (in part) by the community, it doesn’t seem good to limit the bracha to this blog, or to me, your benevolent dictator, Judah Gabriel.
Instead, the content would be owned by the web’s Messianic community. Also, with links being submitted throughout the week, there’s little reason for the bracha to be weekly – it could be daily. Links coming in, getting posted immediately.
Summary of changes
Bottom line:
| Old Weekly Bracha | New Bracha |
| Kineti blog only! | Has own dedicated website |
| Content submitted by Judah | Anyone can submit content, user-generated |
| Benevolent dictatorship | Democracy |
| Owned by Judah | Content owned by the Messianic community |
| Weekly roundup | Links posted daily as they are approved by admin(s) |
| What Judah says goes | Community could vote content up or down, ala Digg |
Do these changes sound good to you, fine blog reader? Or is it better to leave the bracha as-is, limited to this blog, with the benevolent dictator model in place?