Google Wave and PodBible

Since I saw the promo video I've been keen to see if Google Wave could be the tool we are looking for to encourage people who listen to PodBible to begin to share their responses to the biblical texts to which they listen. Once I'd hoped Facebook would be the tool, but it does not seem to be. It works fine for quick easy relatively trivial communication but does not seem good at extended conversations. Email is good at those, but only good for small groups who want to read the conversation as it grows. Discussion forums are good for such prolongued discussion, but can seem somewhat disconnected and impersonal (no one knows you are a dog on the Internet ;)

I have just received my invitation to Wave :) so if you like PodBible and would be interested in helping me to explore Wave with a view to using it to get conversation and prayer going around the chapters please email me and I might use one of my eight invitations for you. If you are already "on Wave" please also let me know so I can add oyu as a contact (since I do not use Gmail it could not open my contacts automatically :(

Bible 60 Samuel

The two books of Samuel as audio Bible chapters, packaged in roughly one hour collections, for easy transfer to CD or cassette, or for listening on those long journeys.

1 Samuel

• Bible 60 1 Samuel 1-15
  
• Bible 60 1 Samuel 16-31

2 Samuel

• Bible 60 2 Samuel 1-12
  
• Bible 60 2 Samuel 13-25
  

Bible completed!

Today we podcast the last chapter to complete the whole Bible! After nearly four years of work, starting with 300+ volunteers reading the whole Bible live over Labour Weekend in 2005, and continuine with teams brainstorming ideas for something to Think about, Pray about and Do for each chapter the daily podcast series is complete.

We will continue to provide a daily chapter, but the whole Bible is now available to download chapter-by-chapter. We have begun work on a couple of new projects to develop PodBible further.

First we are packaging chapters to make 60 minute collections (book by book) so that people can download these "Bible60" collections to put on CDs, tapes or their car radios to listen to longer swathes of Scripture (with no TPDs added).

Then we are working to make the daily podcasts available in AMR format (much smaller files than the MP3s we podcast here) for download to mobile phone... news of a launch soon we hope :)

By ther way if providing Bible readings to more than a thousand people a day sounds worthwhile to you maybe you could help by taking a share of the regular tasks needed to run the podcasts, with a little training we can provide, anyone who is moderately computer literate could do what is needed in less than an hour a week... write to Tim to get more details...

Schedule of readings

Someone asked:

Is there a listing of the order of the readings? Is it straight through, chronological, some kind of mix?

These are good questions! Being "on the inside" we did not think to answer them till you asked ;)

Bible in a Year: The readings follow the traditional Protestant Canon roughly alternating an Old Testament book with a New Testament book. There are a few adjustments for the different number of books in each "half" of the Bible and because too many psalms or proverbs in a row might be "too much of a good thing" those books are split into sections. The order is the one used by this email service.

Chapter a Day: Here the order is much more complex, basically we are "doing" the books that have not yet been podcast, so that we will have the whole Bible available (we should finish this year :) though we are repeating the gospels, and to fit in with a Bible reading and discussing plan a friend is organising we may repeat some other books. Again we roughly alternate Old and New Testaments, and have split up the psalms into roughly two week "chunks".

Bible60 Joshua & Judges

Two more books ready as audio Bible chapters, packaged in roughly one hour collections, for easy transfer to CD or cassette, or for listening on those long journeys.

Joshua:

• Bible 60 Joshua 1-12


• Bible 60 Joshua 13-24

Judges:

• Bible 60 Judges 1-11
  
  
• Bible 60 Judges 12-21

Bible60 Pentateuch

Bible60 Pentateuch

Audio Bible chapters, packaged in roughly one hour collections, for easy transfer to CD or cassette, or for listening on those long journeys.

Genesis:

• Bible 60 Genesis 1-20
• Bible 60 Genesis 21-35
• Bible 60 Genesis 36-50

Exodus:

• Bible 60 Exodus 1-16
• Bible 60 Exodus 17-28
• Bible 60 Exodus 29-40

Leviticus

• Bible 60 Leviticus 1-14
• Bible 60 Leviticus 15-27

Numbers

• Bible 60 Numbers 1-16
• Bible 60 Numbers 17-36

Deuteronomy

• Bible 60 Deuteronomy 1-17
• Bible 60 Deuteronomy 18-34

Bible 60: Leviticus

Yes, by popular demand ;) one of the least read (by Christians anyway) Bible books now comes packaged in neat Bible 60 format - just download and write to CD, dub to cassette, for someone who finds reading difficult, or just get an hour at a time for listening in the car...

• Leviticus 1-14
• Leviticus 15-27
  

Bible 60: Exodus

Bible 60 packages chapters from the PodBible reading of the CEV in convenient clusters. Each package will be about 60 minutes, ideal to dub to a C60 cassette, or write to an audio CD, for someone who's eyesight is going, or an easy 20-30MB download to listen to on a journey...

Here is Bible 60 Exodus:

• Bible 60 Exodus 1-16
• Bible 60 Exodus 17-28
• Bible 60 Exodus 29-40

Other books will be available soon!

Bible 60: a new way to download an audio Bible

We are beginning to make PodBible available in a new way. Bible 60 packages chapters from the PodBible reading of the CEV in convenient clusters. Each package will be about 60 minutes, ideal to dub to a C60 cassette, or write to an audio CD, for someone who's eyesight is going, or an easy 20-30MB download to listen to on a journey...

The first book available in Bible 60 packages is the first book of the Bible, Genesis:

• Bible 60 Genesis 1-20
• Bible 60 Genesis 21-35
• Bible 60 Genesis 36-50

Other books will be available soon!

Some of our future plans for PodBible in 2008-9

We plan several significant new things in the next year or so:

• PodBible for mobile phone, we expect soon to go live with the PodBibe.mobi site (at present it is experimental) it will offer the PodBible readings for download to mobile phones. The website is phone friendly, and the audio will be 4-5 times smaller than the MP3s on this site. The bad news is that they only play on phones, or computers with Quicktime installed, and that they are slightly lower quality :(
  
  Mobile phones are much more widely used than Internet in many parts of the world (including Africa and much of Asia) so this will extend the ways PodBible speaks to the parts print Bibles do not reach.
  
• Bible 60s collections of chapters from a book or related books that last for about 60 minutes, as high quality MP3s, designed to be downloaded and put on CD or C60 cassette tapes for people who have difficulty reading but do not use computers or MP3 players - ideal for those elderly members of your local church.
• Bible books high quality MP3s of the chapters of each book in one ZIP file for easy download - ideal for study purposes, share them with your students, youth group, Bible study group etc. (either as MP3s or on CD for the car...).
  

To do all this needs both more time, some of which we may have to pay for though we mainly use volunteers, and more webserver bandwidth, which will cost more. Currently we are delivering 30GB/month, to raise this to the 200GB/month we expect to be delivering this time next year means moving from cheap shared hosting to a "virtual private server".

To do all this will cost more than our current income which comes from a Balmoral Baptist Church "mission parcel", so there are two ways people could help:

• If you have good computer skills and some time to spare you could help splicing the WAVs together and making the MP3s and ZIPed colections.
• If you can donate some money just make a bank transfer to:
  Balmoral Baptist Church 12-3021-0296342-00
  please mark it
  "PodBible" (NZ tax payers making larger donations can even arrange to get a receipt to claim the tax back :) phone 09 620 5114 to arrange this.
• If you are a PHP wizard Nathan K might be glad of some help with getting PodBible.mobi going.
  

PodBible for mobile phones

We are trying to make the PodBible audio Bible (podcasts) available to users on mobile phones, when that project is ready it will be at https://podbible.mobi but at present that's just an experimental site. We have a problem though with MP3 files, they are still too big!

On FutureBible (the overarching project to deliver the Bible in various ways to mobile phones) David introduces us to a (to me) new file format AMR: An alternative to mp3, I have tried it, using the conversion tool David points to, and it works, a 1.11MB MP3 (at 32kbps) becomes a 218KB AMR (at 6.7 MR) which sounds "nearly" as good though till I amplified it was a bit "quieter".

However, I have two questions you might be able to answer for me:

1. What mobile phones can or can't play AMR files? So if you have a phone can you try downloading this AMR file and seeing if it plays, and report the make, model and result below, please!
2. What exactly are the licensing issues with AMR there is a link on the Wikipedia site to an VoiceAge legal page, but I go cross-eyed trying to find out what that means for ordinary non-commercial users. Any comments on that would be helpful too!
   

YouPod (help wanted)

We'd love to hear your stories. In particular it would be a great encouragement to us, and probably to other listeners if you could tell us when a chapter has meant something special to oy, or when the Think|Pray|Do ideas have sparked your ideas in a special way.

Ideally we'll do this simply by changing this blog so that each day posts the current day's chapter as the title of the post, which can other wise be blank or better with just a short invitation like "Tell us our responses to this passage here:"

The chapters in PodBible are podcast using PHP to read the directories and create both the RSS feeds and the corresponding web pages. So... what I need is someone who can help me create a blog using the same (sort of?) mechanism.

If you know someone who might (a) be interested in helping and (b) might have the necessary skills please let me know!

Does Zondervan "get it" at last?

John has a link to an interview on Christianity Today with Maureen Girkins, Zondervan’s CEO in the interview she says that Zondervan's singing and dancing all celebrity Audio Bible The Bible Experience was their best-selling Bible in 2007. That should be no surprise to PodBiblers, our un-advertised, read-by-plain-ordinary-people, Bible delivers more than 40,000 audio Bible chapters each month!

They asked her:

Can you tease out an example of how publishing will change?

Wireless phones, which didn't exist 20 years ago, have changed not only the way people communicate but also the way they live. People are going to read, and they're going to read paper for the rest of our lifetimes. But I'm convinced that different distribution for content will change the way we live. We have entered the digital world. It's not like we're just stepping our toe into it. The Bible Experience audio Bible was the best-selling Bible of 2007.

I think we can make some predictions today for how further distribution changes will alter the way we live our Christian life. The spiritual journey many of us have will be changed by the Internet and digital technology. But I'd like a little more time in this discovery process before I can vocalize how.

Now, this is cautious, but much less cautious than print-based publishers usually are! It makes projects like David's for mobile phones or our PodBible relevance visible!

(Audio?) Bible on mobile phones

David Ker, who works in Mozambique - where mobile phones are less expensive to run than NZ, and Internet less available - is putting together a project to make the Bible available in various ways by mobile phone. To listen in, or join the discussion just subscribe to the blog...

Incidentally if you have any knowledge or ideas that can help with making PodBible more accessible to mobile phone users please comment, we have the domain PodBible.mobi but do not yet really know how to use it!

PodBible Blogged

Heidi Campbell who teaches communication at Texas A & M, is in NZ for a few weeks taking part in various colloquia and things, she is the latest blogger to post about this audio Bible "PodBible: An experiment in MP3ing the Good Book". Heidi will be meeting with a bunch of others to talk about her work, and especially her study of religious bloggers. When the date is finalised I'll post details here so those in NZ (now a minority of PodBible listeners) can get to meet her.

Breaking records and new plans

PodBible has so far in June regularly broken the 1,000 visitor per day mark (a few days have been just under the "magic" figure, but others as high a 1,200 more than make up for them. We have also been delivering about half a gigabyte of data every day on average. That equates to thousands of chapters each day, so clearly not everyone is using the chapter-a-day format!

In the light of this usage we have several plans for making PodBible more useful:

• somewhere for you to "talk" about what you hear - the details even the broad outline is still unclear, but we'd like YouTalk which is what we'll call it to be informal, easy to use, in various ways (including a Twitter-like box with thoughts people are recording right now, that changes live as people add new things
• downloadable "CDs" and "Cassette tapes" that people can use to make up PodBible for the elderly, or to listen to a whole book on a long drive (even if they do not have one of those clever MP3 on your car radio gadgets)
  
• introductions to Bible books and links to other helps to understanding "what's going on"
  
• and, last but biggest, something like PodBible in other languages (see xoBible for one dream of this) remember the second highest usage of PodBible by country is now China and several countries in the top 30 are not traditional English speaking places!
  

Performing Job

Hi, all, not really PodBible, but related. A group of us are talking about recording the book of Job, with each "character" read by a different person. We will be doing this on Librivox so the result needs to be in the public domain. That means we can't use a modern translation. Please listen to the three possibilities listed at this post on Tim's blog, and comment on their suitability!

5 Minute Bible

If you like PodBible, you may like 5 Minute Bible a new "audio blog" by Tim that will have 5 minute audio about Bible passages. Sometimes they'll be more devotional like the first post:

• Praising the fradulent agent on Luke 16,
  

sometimes more of a lecture like the second:

• Humour in the Bible: Part 1: Introducing Saul

Music and Bible

Listeners to PodBible may be interested in another audio Bible project the Manna Bible is providing readings of Scripture with a musical backing track specially written to dramatise the text. So far they seem to have just a few chapters done - it is a massive project. They needed copyright free translations so are providing KJV and WEB. If I find out more I will blog about Manna Bible again...

Audio Bible in a Year mentioned on Better Bibles

Thanks, Wayne, for mentioning that one of the options here is to hear the whole audio CEV Bible in a year. Basically if your new year's resolution was to read the Bible in 2007 but you prefer to listen than read remember you just need either to log on daily to PodBible and download the day's chunk, or set your blog or podcast software to do it for you!