Cyber Missionary Testimonial Pages
Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:02 pm
Testimony pages from LDS Cyber Missionaries to overwhelm anti-Mormon sites in search engines.
As Elder Ballard pointed out in a recent talk, online seekers of information about the LDS Church are all too often led to sources that misinform. I think a lot can be done to help address that problem.
A Google search of the word "mormon" today took only .04 seconds to come up with 16,300,000 references. A quick glance at just the first 20 of those references showed that more than half were most likely misleading or critical of the LDS Church. Looking further would probably increase the numbers of misleading sources of information about "Mormons" on each page of references.
I think one of the main reasons why non-members are so often led to online anti-Mormon sources of information is because of the overwhelming number of such sources compared to reliable LDS sources.
I am certain that there are better ideas than mine and I am not technically skilled. But I think it is possible to automatically create webpages for thousands of people who go to one site and fill in a questionnaire that personalizes each newly created webpage. For example, in that fashion, volunteers ("LDS Cyber Missionaries" if you will) could quickly produce possibly tens of thousands of webpages perhaps similar to the following:
[url=mhtml:{09272DBB-5804-4926-A7B0-C39813AD4444}mid://00001205/!x-usc:http://www.mormon1.org/]http://www.mormon1.org[/url]
Participating member volunteers would go to a central cyber missionary site in their own language where they would qualify in a similar manner as gaining access to stake and ward websites. There they would fill in a questionnaire including a brief testimony of why they are a member of the Church, or their conversion story. The software would automatically create a personalized webpage for them, perhaps mormon2.mormon.org, mormon3.mormon.org etc. that would soon find its way into the search engines. Eventually the top Google search references might include a lot of those pages from ordinary 'grassroots' Latter-day Saints. I think those simple personalized pages would be appealing to sincere truth seekers.
Is this technically possible and if so is there someone reading this who would be interested enough to bring it to the attention of Church decision makers?
As Elder Ballard pointed out in a recent talk, online seekers of information about the LDS Church are all too often led to sources that misinform. I think a lot can be done to help address that problem.
A Google search of the word "mormon" today took only .04 seconds to come up with 16,300,000 references. A quick glance at just the first 20 of those references showed that more than half were most likely misleading or critical of the LDS Church. Looking further would probably increase the numbers of misleading sources of information about "Mormons" on each page of references.
I think one of the main reasons why non-members are so often led to online anti-Mormon sources of information is because of the overwhelming number of such sources compared to reliable LDS sources.
I am certain that there are better ideas than mine and I am not technically skilled. But I think it is possible to automatically create webpages for thousands of people who go to one site and fill in a questionnaire that personalizes each newly created webpage. For example, in that fashion, volunteers ("LDS Cyber Missionaries" if you will) could quickly produce possibly tens of thousands of webpages perhaps similar to the following:
[url=mhtml:{09272DBB-5804-4926-A7B0-C39813AD4444}mid://00001205/!x-usc:http://www.mormon1.org/]http://www.mormon1.org[/url]
Participating member volunteers would go to a central cyber missionary site in their own language where they would qualify in a similar manner as gaining access to stake and ward websites. There they would fill in a questionnaire including a brief testimony of why they are a member of the Church, or their conversion story. The software would automatically create a personalized webpage for them, perhaps mormon2.mormon.org, mormon3.mormon.org etc. that would soon find its way into the search engines. Eventually the top Google search references might include a lot of those pages from ordinary 'grassroots' Latter-day Saints. I think those simple personalized pages would be appealing to sincere truth seekers.
Is this technically possible and if so is there someone reading this who would be interested enough to bring it to the attention of Church decision makers?