A Website Review of GospelScoop.com

Photo by Do'Neil, published under the terms of GFDL

This week's featured website is GospelScoop.com. It's patterned after social media sites like Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com, but it's oriented toward Christian users. On their About Page, Digg says about their website:

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web... Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images to Podcasts — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

GospelScoop operates in the same way, but as I wrote above, it's oriented towards Christians and news related to our shared faith. By its nature, GospelScoop doesn't likely have the potential to grow as large as Digg because it's less open-ended, more specific in its focus and content, but that's okay. In fact, it's great. Having specialized sites that appeal to niche communities is one of the cool things about the Internet, and of all niches, Christianity is a rather large one!

I'd love to see GospelScoop grow and reach its "carry capacity" so to speak. So far, top scoops reach the front page of GospelScoop with only eight or nine votes (as opposed to the 1,569 votes that the top Digg article has as I'm writing this- which is low compared to the upwards of 8,000 votes the top Digg article had yesterday). On the one hand, this means GospelScoop is relatively small- top scooped stories will get you less traffic than a front page Digg story, but on the other hand it means that now is the time to join up and take advantage of the powerful marketing tool GospelScoop is offering to your Christian website or blog!

Imagine getting in good with Digg.com in its early days and becoming a top Digger! What would that be worth to you today? I would highly encourage you to join GospelScoop.com if you're a blogger or webmaster and submit good content and vote on the other great content there, to participate in the community and to promote it to other Christian bloggers and friends so that it grows. If you're not a blogger but interested in having a community similar to Digg, but focused on Christian topics, here's a great opportunity to help build one.

While you're there, I would discourage you from "gaming the system" in some way. Digg has had its fair share of issues with "bury brigades," multiple fake users, and other dubious means of controlling content flow. Your unlikely to have success with such methods because they've been observed, dealt with, and lessons have been learned in the process. You'll probably just get yourself banned from GospelScoop. I imagine with its community standards informed by the Christian faith, GospelScoop's webmaster has zero tolerance for such behavior. Just don't do it. It's not cool.

But for all legitimate content sharing and voting, GospelScoop is the place for web-savvy Christians to get their news. Oh yeah... and while you're there, be sure to scoop any posts of mine that you like ;)

Because it is Slaying Dragons' current featured website, GospelScoop.com will be featured at the top of my links page until the next featured website comes along. If you would like to be included on my links page, let me know.