I have developed what is called a “social bookmarking“¹ site for reformed theology at http://www.castlechurch.org. The whole idea is fairly progressive for reformed theology folk, but I think it has the potential to be something extremely useful. To speak plainly, Castle Church is sort of a living bibliography. Its purpose is to provide a space for people to collect, organize and share reformed resources from around the Internet. There is so much good content out there - it’s just hard to find and organize sometimes. Castle Church [along with the help of a community] will solve that problem.

What it Does

The site has a number of useful features, but perhaps the most useful and interesting is the blog aggregation. This is where I really have “scratched my own itch.” As many of you know, the blogosphere is full of decent reformed content. The problem is finding the really good stuff. Many people end up subscribing to 20+ RSS feeds just to keep tabs on what’s going on. They then end up getting flooded with posts they’ll never be able to read. Castle Church aggregates many reformed blogs - letting the community add new blogs that aren’t already being tracked.² As new posts are written to those blogs, they appear on Castle Church and the people of the community can then rate and tag the posts. This activity helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Basically, the community as a whole acts to pick out the good stuff. Community members can then just look at the main posts page or subscribe to an RSS feed in order to see the new stuff the community thought was worthwhile.³

As of now, the site is able to track articles, books, links to sites, blogs, blog posts, and files (lectures, sermons, etc.). The community is able to add and organize these types of content in a collaborative fashion.⁴ The site is designed to let everyone contribute as well as reap the benefits of an organized corpus of reformed theological material. If any of you have used Wikipedia, you’ll have a sense as to how powerful collaboration on the web can be.

How to Help

I need people to be involved in the beta test. The site’s main features for version 1.0 are just about in place, but I would like to get people to be involved in the community in order to gather feedback and to see how the application handles a load. In order to help out, just visit Castle Church, signup and begin using the site. If you have any suggestions or if you find a bug, please let me know by using the feedback link is at the bottom of the page.

1. Many social bookmarking sites have popped up over the last few years such as digg and del.icio.us, however, I am unaware of any sites dealing with reformed theology.↩
2. This is an interesting way to publicize your own blog. By having Castle Church track your blog, you are exposing it to many more potential readers.↩
3. Of course one may still look at everything.↩
4. I have had to implement an editorial system in order to maintain the quality of the reformed content. We don’t want to get spammed or taken over by the trolls you typically find in blog comment threads. As community members submit good content and refrain from abusing the system, the editors will “promote” people to the editorial level.↩