(Their tagline, not mine!)
I finally got an invite to try eBible.com during their beta, and to be honest I’m not quite as impressed as I had hoped I’d be. Remember how I’d wanted to check it out because it’s all new and shiny and web2.0-ized? Well, it’s definitely not shiny. No gradients!
That was my lame web2.0 pun for the day.
Rounded corners notwithstanding, I’m not exactly sure what makes eBible “web 2.0″ – they do offer a “bookmark” feature that sort of mashes up the conventional definition of bookmark with the new, post-del.icio.us definition (because you’re tagging a passage from the Good Book, and then letting others see what you’ve bookmarked – social!), but there’s nothing else to indicate that this site is about the “collaborative, user-generated social web.”
The first thing you see when you land on their front page is a big yellow search box from which you can search by Bible verse, keyword, product or tag (which is like a keyword, really). They also have something called “Answer”, which seems to be like the dictionary/concordance you’d find at the end of your physical Bible. At first I thought the giant cloud underneath the form was a cloud of popular searches, but it’s tags. You can browse by tags, if you’re bored.
I was hoping to be able to browse by book, but I guess you can just type in the book name in the search window (like John). When you do, you are led to a page that shows you the Bible passage containing your reference. On the right is the passage, and on the left is a box that contains any tags you might have applied to the passage from earlier searches, or if you click the “Commentary” link, will pop up the commentary of your choice (right now they have “Believer’s Bible” and “Nelson’s New Illustrated”).
The cool part comes next: you can read this Bible excerpt in 6 versions (other places, like Biblegateway.com, provide many, many more versions, and I’m a little surprised eBible doesn’t offer the NIV, but I’m an NASB fan and they do have that) — but if you want to compare two versions, you can view them both side-by-side! Neat-o! (And apparently, “The Message” is a bit more long-winded than NASB). At any point, you can highlight a verse or passage, and apply your tags so you can find them easier later, I guess. Which I could definitely see the value of.
[The fun thing about eBible.com is how ubiquitous their monetization stuff is - not only do ads show up in search results (though not on the Bible passage pages themselves), but prominent among their search options is the Product search, and there are lots of places where they provide ways for you to, ah, spiritually, part with your money (and help sustain their site).]
Aside from this cool side-by-side passage viewing thing, though, eBible doesn’t (yet) provide nearly as many resources as it could – particularly in its offering of searchable Bible versions. It might work fine as a personal Bible reference/journal (because of hte bookmarking), but if you want to do some serious Bible study, you’d be better off checking the more comprehensive resources at BibleGateway, or Bible.org (strangely enough, Bible.com *looks* more web2.0 than this site does).
And I’m still not sure what makes eBible “web 2.0″ – they need to provide more content, and more services, than just the ability to view others’ bookmarks. One thing they might do, for example, is to get people to start discussions on the Bible, and maybe do so in light of present-day events (ok, so maybe I just described Digg.com for the Bible, but you know what I mean! Something that allows you to *do* something with those bookmarks, maybe). I can understand how this stuff might not be within the scope of eBible’s purpose, if they just want to present the one, true unerring Word of God, but the fact that you’re using Ruby on Rails to do it (while *awesome*) doesn’t mean you’re entitled to call it web 2.0.
Not to mention, the “e-” prefix is SO 1.0 =D
I have 3 invites, so if anyone would like to use eBible, let me know.
