Dean Peters, webmaster at blogs4God has written that he feels it’s time to change the site. Not just the look-and-feel, but the whole content and purpose of blogs4God.

Originally, the list was established to help the Christian voice be identified in an emerging media, the blogosphere. Now it has become noisy to the point of inefficacy.

Meaning, if I/we could catch up to the backlog of submissions over the past couple months while in transition, would listing these new blogs have any impact whatsoever other than to make blogs4God different like everyone else? If that last statement confused you, ask yourself, would you notice yet another tattoo on Dennis Rodman?

I think he’s probably right. As much as I love blogs4God, it’s probably due for a renovation. All sites renovate over time. I’ve changed my site here a few times, including from Movable Type to Typepad & back again.

Commenting on the suggestions that Dean has made:

The syndication issue is a big one. Now that Google has acquired Blogger and are providing (Atom) syndication as part of the free service, most bloggers have access to syndication of some sort.

Saying "You can’t be listed if you’re not aggregatable" won’t be popular in some areas, but the amount of time it takes to get content from all non-syndicated sites is prohibitive, and one of the problems Dean has listed that he needs to solve. Perhaps there’s a middle-ground of sorts. Enable non-syndicated sites to be listed in the directory of sites (in whatever new format that will be) but make it painfully obvious to the submitter that while their site will be listed, it will not be highlighted or linked to due to the time it takes to get content from them. Provide a list of free tools to syndicate their site and/or a list of blogging programmes/services that provide syndication when people go to submit their site.

Offering a promotion-for-content deal is a good one. If you post to the site you’ll get a mention on the site. This will, however, attract link-whores, so some sort of moderation will probably be necessary. I don’t know whether you’d want to say goodbye to all the moderators just yet. Keeping with the current categories structure (this could be changed, I don’t know) it could be possible to post content into a certain category, and the front page would just display the most recent posts in all categories, or you could drill-down to a specific category (as well as providing feeds for all these too!)

Hit-and-run posting is probably a good idea, and it will make it less intimidating for new contributors if they’re able to just post a line or two on something they’ve noticed or an idea they’ve had. However I wouldn’t remove longer posts either. As Dean mentioned, Sundays are good for sermons Maybe Sundays could be set aside for more profound/in-depth posts by experienced contributors (or even guest contributors).

New design: Don’t ask me, I’m a developer, not a designer. Anyone who’s seen my site can see I have 0 graphical ability. My wife’s the artistic one in the family. The forums on Niphal are a good place to start if you’re looking for design inspiration though.

Glenn’s list of other ideas for the new site:

• Using some fancy code combined with some human moderation could produce some very useful topic based lists. For my 2.2 cents I wouldn’t restrict it to RSS2.0 & Atom, as a lot of people still use RSS1.0. In fact, the stats on this site consistently show that more people subscribe to my RSS1.0 feed than my RSS2.0 feed (Atom is by and far the most popular though).

  Given enough time investment it could be possible to produce from the categorised feeds a newspaper-style page for summaries of the content, similar to Feeddemon’s newspaper feature or Google News, but that may be too ambitious for the resources available. It may be possible to leverage existing tools to do this, such as Technorati or Feedster.

  If nothing else, a list of the most recent posts (with summaries if possible, or full content, or both. Choice is good!) from all submissions in that category would be good (i.e. Planet Mozilla).

• A list of ‘Christian’ web tools, services & resources could be useful. It would probably consist of a collection of links and summaries submitted by users rather than having to have one person source them. These could be tools for developing and improving Christian sites/blogs, but also standard resources like online bible-study guides. Perhaps allowing users to rate the resources on their usefulness and then provide a list of the most popular/useful tools out there.

• Using click-through statistics from the lists (and syndication feeds of those lists) it would be possible to build up some very interesting statistics on the popularity of certain sites. Not for the narcissistic hubris of the authors, but to see trends in interest. What are people interested in, what topics do people want to read about. Using some sort of keyword collation it would be possible to extract keyword based trends as well. What words (or phrases as it may be) are people most drawn to read about? Think Google’s zeitgeist. Given that this is a Christian site, perhaps stats like ‘Most clicked on site’ or ‘Most popular author’ shouldn’t be listed, I don’t know.

  This all, once again, would take a serious amount of doing, and may be beyond the scope of what Dean has in mind.

• Keep the directory of sites. In whatever format, a list of Christian blogs is a Good Thing^™

Lots of ideas, don’t know how many, if any, are feasible. Just thoughts.