Christ in the Cloud?

Many Christians find the practice of daily devotional reading important for their spiritual development. Since 1956 an evangelical Christian ministry Radio Bible Class has produced a little booklet called "Our Daily Bread" that includes a daily Bible reading and related inspirational thought. Other popular devotional booklets are "The Upper Room" (1935) and the Roman Catholic publication "The Word Among Us" (1981). There have been "Daily Breads" around our house since I was a child, and they remain a helpful tool for worship and reflection.

Media has changed, and I was interested to see that these ministries have enthusiastically adopted new media to communicate their message. You can still get "Our Daily Bread" in booklet form, but also as a streaming audio, podcast, mobile download, RSS or Twitter Feed.

What caught my attention was the tag cloud built of descriptive terms (tags) associated with each devotional and "weighted" based of popularity of that tag. Like the tag list I have on my blog except theirs is much cooler. These tags are actually assigned by the author, and as such aren't really "social tags" where the readers, not the author, decides what the devotional is "about" and tags it accordingly.

It is interesting to see the very different tags in this floating cloud. I was wondering how the tags would be different if I tagged the devotionals or if you did. I was looking at the tags for the devotional on October 22, 2009; I would have chosen some of them, but others seemed too abstract or theological. Who are they for? Faith is very personal; I would think that the tags would tell you as much about me as they likely would about the devotionals. Maybe I'll need to suggest social tagging to the folks at "Our Daily Bread."

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