Is somebody shutting the gate at Bible Gateway?
Rich Tatum seems to think so. He has a scoop on a possible shutdown for the most famous Bible portal on the web. Apparently the word leaked out via the Muskegon Chronicle. The what? That’s right, Muskegon. According to the ever helpful Wikipedia, Muskegon is a town and county in Michigan.
Before you panic, I would say it’s extremely unlikely that biblegateway.com will disappear. But if it changes hands who will have the say on how Bibles are shared? And what will be the impact of possible ad-revenue or subscription-based services?
If anyone is interested in financing a bid for Bible Gateway, please contact me. I’m willing to partner with wealthy donors to secure this valuable resource for the foreseeable future.
posted by David Ker at 3:41 PM
10 Comments:
hardly cause for despair, dismay, or even a ruffled nose. there are plenty of bible gateways out there. one less won't cause anything like even a small ripple.
You're wrong there, Jim. This is #1 and a huge amount of effort has been poured into getting it to where it is today. When people want to look up the Bible on the web BG is where they go.
That's where I go first, David. It has so many different translations, as well as online commentaries, particularly the BG IVP NT commentaries which I have found very useful.
Crosswalk has a lot of stuff, too, but it's so much that if your computer isn't the latest and most powerful it could choke on all that info. Of the common Bible sites, I think BG is the friendliest to use. This is big news!
Not to worry, there is also biblos.com
I'm sure it won't go away completely, but will it still remain accessible? Too many purchasers of resources like this manage to kill their goose before it has laid more than a couple of golden eggs. In this case charging for access would probably kill the site, especially if there are half decent competitors. But advertising that is modest in both quantity and content could bring in a good income.
Hey, thanks, r! I'd never heard of Biblos.com. Looks great, except some of the translations link directly to Bible Gateway and Crosswalk. But it's got an interlinear! Very nice!
Could Bible Gateway have been taken over by Logos? The latter have just announced a beta version of their own new Bible site, which looks quite impressive although not yet as fully featured as Bible Gateway. (Thanks to Eddie for linking to this post through Bible Behemoth - your giant baby is doing some good, David.) The Logos RefTagger tool currently "automatically turns all of your Bible references into hyperlinks to the passages at BibleGateway.com", but "As soon as Bible.Logos.com is ready to handle all the traffic that RefTagger is generating, we’re going to flip the switch and connect the two." This kind of tie-up would make sense. If this does actually happen, you first read it here!
Thanks for the hat-tip!
I'll post more about the Bible Gateway thing as soon as I know more myself, and can talk about it.
Rich
BlogRodent
Rich, please send any news crumbs our way. We rely on BG a lot and a long term sustainable reftag system is important to many people.
BibleGateway.com and Gospel.com Acquired by Zondervan
Rich
BlogRodent
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