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Richard Macmanus, founder and editor of Read/Write Web, one of the most successful Web 2.0 business/tech blog/websites, has launched a new series of reviews and articles, titled, Religion and Web Technology.

He is going to write about churches and other religious organizations that use Web 2.0 media well. His first piece is about an Oklahoma church with the website LifeChurch.tv. It’s an interesting read and offers a lot of ideas that can be put to use by amutot – religious or not.
As part of that review, I wrote to him regarding things we are doing here at Shalom Hartman Institute, and which are summarized below. Let this stand as fulfillment of my promise to the Amuta 2.0 folks to recapitulate some of the points in my talk at the conference earlier this month.

Our website includes regular Op-Ed length essays by our leaders and scholars on topics of interest to the Jewish/Israeli worlds. We include “talkbacks” (reader comments) on our articles, some of which draw large responses.

We also stream lectures from our scholars and leaders both onsite and offsite. I have used Blip.tv for full-length videos, YouTube for short ones (we were named 2nd most-viewed Israeli non-profit on YouTube), and Jewish video sites Yideoz.com and JewTube.com for additional distribution (although both sites have their technical issues).

To upgrade the quality of our videos, which had been single-camera-plopped-in-front-of-a-seated-lecturer boring, we hired a professional cameraman this summer who intercut and edited the videos, as well as added intros and credits at the end. We have had interest in these from a Jewish cable TV network in the U.S., as well as have placed these on an online Jewish Internet TV network.

We have done video-enabled distance learning to rabbis, teachers and community leaders in North America for 5+ years via dedicated, non-Internet lines. We are transitioning this fall to online video via Ustream.tv and/or Mogulus.com. Some of our courses are for small groups, so we will keep those streams private for a while before making the recorded videos public.

I started an offsite blog for our site – http://hartmaninstitute.wordpress.com – to allow us to use Hebrew, to enhance search, and to give a less formal view of our activities.

I am working – with some frustrating lack of success – to launch an iTunes podcast audio and video versions – although I suspect the problem is more my lack of understanding than anything else (help appreciated!).

We have purchased URL’s that correspond with the names of some of our leading individuals – donnielhartman.com, and rabbihartman.com (not surprisingly, davidhartman.com was taken), and are building individual sites for them.

We also are working on enhancing the Wikipedia entries others have created.

We are developing a Facebook strategy, as well. I use my FB page (Alan Abbey – please ask to friend) to promote our content and videos, and have created a FB group for a group of North American rabbis studying with us. I regularly place our material on related Jewish/Israeli FB groups, as well as promote through Twitter.

We are weaker than I would like in social networking, however. Our existing audience is older than the standard online audience, and we are slowly making headway.

All this is not to say we are doing the best job in the Jewish world. There are some better funded, and larger organizations with intensive Web operations. We are probably, however, one of the better organized “mainstream” Jewish organizations online (i.e., not Ultra-Orthodox, not “messianic” Jewish, and not “New Age-y”).

I would love it, of course if our Amuta 2.0 users were to look at our ops and review, comment and critique. I could use some advice!

[Update: Read/Write web featured the Hartman Institute as part of its Religion and Web Technology series ]

This post was written by A lan D. Abbey, Internet Director at the Shalom Hartman Institute – http://hartman.org.il/

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