Blogging: Community and Collaboration

While the Bible software business is by no means a new market niche, it has definitely exploded in the last 5 years. When I was first in college (all of 4 years ago!), hardly anyone I knew had Bible sofware. I first bought BibleWorks 5 my sophomore year of college as I was beginning my studies in Greek and Hebrew. Now I don't think you can find a single person at seminary who doesn't own at least one Bible software program. If you can, they'll be able to tell you which one they'd like to buy if they only had the money. As I tried to say in the last post, this blog is not for people who want to trash one Bible program at another's expense. I would rather that Bible software companies collaborate on some of these projects than compete against one another. Furthermore, I wish users of said programs could do the same!!

I don't know what happens in board-rooms or living rooms (for the smaller ones :) ) of companies, but I do know what happens in my world. In my world, I'm trying to find ways to study God's Word and the Greek language [I'm also an aspiring Classicist]. I know one company doesn't always have the resources or the desire to be all things to all people. Companies focus on the center of the market (or in some cases on their specific niche, if that niche is a faithful one). Sometimes you'll find that your needs and wants are not what the market in general wants. The way I see it, you have a couple of options: 1. You can cry and whine, either hoping to convince the company that your needs are worth the investment or else hoping to create a mobile user-group who feels as you do and thus change the market. (Ok, so maybe that's a little blunt :) if so, read "You can speak up...") or 2. If something is so valuable to you, go out and seek it, do it yourself.

Now granted, very few of us out there are sophisticated computer programmers, so there aren't too many things users can do, but by working together I think users can do a lot of things. This website hosts a vast amount of things users have done already on their own. Actually the most surprising thing is how much stuff there is out there considering how few the number of actual contributors are. What I think this shows is that normal folks (if that could be used to describe someone like myself) are able to make a number of significant contributions to the digital world that add, amplify and support programs like BibleWorks, Logos and Accordance. This blog is primarily aimed at BibleWorks users, but users of any and all Bible software programs are invited to be a part of the community as well. Believe it or not, heaven will probably not be divided into groups depending on what Bible software program you use. But here on earth if Bible software is your thing, collaboration, community and sharing just might be a new and better way to go.