5. Jonah: Jewish Educational Link Directory
Yesterday, I proposed an application, Surfcasting, that would create an exchange of free, online tutorials for those interested in learning about Jewish life. Today’s idea centers around helping students and educators discover the highest quality Jewish educational content online.
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A number of years ago, I attended a conference called Rejewvenation, during which I laid the groundwork for some of my software ideas with a presentation about how the Internet was tearing down walls for young Jews interested in remaking Judaism for a new era. Afterward, while sharing some of my ideas for technology platforms with Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, he said to me, “Why bother trying to build this stuff out when so much of these resources are already available online? Just put them all in one place.”
While I still disagree with Reb Aryeh that most of these resources are already available — or, more to the point, that they’re available in a form amenable to novice learners — he had a point about creating a Web site that aggregates the various resources that are presently available into a useful form. Four years later, there is still no superior resource at which to turn when looking for high quality Jewish content from around the Web, save for individual blogs which are themselves scattered and which bury their contributions within a matter of days.
Link directories have been around since the Web moved from being the dominion of the military and academics into a business and consumer-driven arena. And, in all likelihood, they’ve been around for much longer than that. The most well-known link directory today is probably still Yahoo, with DMOZ, the open source alternative to Yahoo coming in at a close second. The oldest Jewish link directory is probably that of Shamash, an online Jewish community that has been around since the pre-Web days of the text-only Internet. And today, there are many more such directories, including MavenSearch, Jewish.net and JewGotIt.
But do you notice what each of those sites have in common, apart from being Jewish link directories? They all suck. Horribly. They’re outdated, their featured links either no longer exist or are so terrible by today’s standards that they’re no longer worth sharing. And even if they were current, there’s no useful information provided about the links themselves, they’re not particularly well-organized, there’s no way for users to provide feedback about current links nor to conveniently report dead ones, and they’re, well, fugly.
As a Web designer, I often seek out inspiration for my design projects, as do many other designers. As a result, over the years, there have been many Web sites that have been created to highlight cutting edge Web design. Design Is Kinky is probably one of the oldest and best known of such sites, as are k10k and Surfstation. These sites were awesome for what they were in their heyday. But around the time that CSS really began to take off in the Web design community, a new kind of designer’s inspiration site became ubiquitous: the CSS gallery. Indeed, soon after designers like Jeffrey Zeldman began leading the charge for Web standards compliance, sites like CSS Beauty and CSS Elite became as commonplace as the use of CSS in Web design itself.
The thing that made CSS galleries so great, and what caused them to succeed so quickly, is that they’re visually driven and interactive. You can find inspiration and submit your own links to be peer-reviewed and highlighted in a venue checked frequently by your contemporaries in the design field. The content, therefore, isn’t just relevant and fresh, but it’s supplemented with truly helpful information from the community consuming it.
So, my idea? Combine the concept of the Jewish link directory with the style, quality and interactivity of the CSS gallery, creating a Web gallery of top-notch online Jewish educational content. The site would be populated by competent Jewish educators who can provide helpful information as to what each featured link contains, pointing out any religious or political biases a site may have, and identifying for what level students its content is appropriate. Those links can then be rated and reviewed by the public. The site would be browsable by category or keyword tag and fully searchable. And to help it go viral, it could offer a widget to publishers whose sites have been featured, displaying the community’s rating of their web site.
The result:
The best part about this project is that it’s so easy to do (thanks to the availability of out-of-the-box Wordpress templates for CSS galleries), that I was able to bang it out myself. A working prototype currently lives here. Feel free to give it a whirl. I’ve called it “Jonah” because it invites people to “dive in” to learning.
At this stage in the process, what I’m looking for are qualified, computer savvy Jewish educators with vast knowledge of the current gamut of Jewish educational content online to contribute reviews to the site on a regular basis. I’m also looking for a little tech help in trying to get some of the functionality going I can’t achieve myself (such as sorting search results by ratings and perfecting image resizing). Finally, I’m looking for a marketing budget so that, once the site’s been thoroughly populated, we can get it up on Google AdWords, in order that people looking for Jewish educational content online can easily find it.
You might think this site’s not that big of a deal — and maybe it’s not — but for people just starting out learning online and even experienced Jewish educators, discovering the best quality Jewish content online is a lot less convenient than you think. With the right community buy-in and cross-promotion, Jonah can take some of the pain out of that process, while drawing attention to others’ contributions to the Jewish content sphere that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Tomorrow, some thoughts on our access to Jewish texts online…
