eBible: The Good Book Gone Web2.0

eBible is one of those things I've been following for a while now, but didn't get a chance to play with until recently. If you haven't heard of it yet, it's the latest electronic incarnation of the Bible, this time as a web2.0 application. Honestly, when I first heard of it, I wasn't all that excited, but now I'm beginning to see why it would be very useful.

Because eBible is available in beta by invitation only for right now, I had a hard time getting my first invitation, but finally got to the head of their waiting list on the site and got a direct invitation. The timing of my invitation couldn't have been better either, because I was invited to preach at my church July 9th while our pastor is out of town. So earlier this week, I was doing some searches for verses to compliment my sermon, and I decided to use eBible to do so.

Two features stuck out to me right away:

• Tagging verses allowed me to place labels on each verse regarding to the topic of the verse as well as why I was tagging it. For a pastor, this could be very useful because you could tag verses by sermon (by date, title, or some other label) to better keep track of when you last used that verse and why.
  
• Searching eBible was also much easier because it not only searches the actual text, but all commentaries you have as well. Not only that, but it searches for all forms of a word and not just a straight text search (for example, a search for "anxiety" will search for "anxious" and "anxiousness" among other variations). This makes searching for verses related to a topic much easier.

There are also several versions of the Bible available right now, so you can have your King James or your NASB, among others. You can also purchase commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias to search through as well, so the information may never end.

For now, eBible is a great tool to look into if you can get an invitation. While it may not have too many church website applications at this time, if you get in and look at the forums, you'll see there are a lot of add-ons and features that will be coming that could be great resources for any church website (Verse of the Day, RSS Feeds, Reading Checklists, etc.), so eBible is definately a resource to keep an eye one.

Oh, and if anyone would like an invitation to check out eBible, I've got one to spare, so please leave a note below with your e-mail address (in the name at thatplace dot com format so you don't get spammed) and I can get that out to you. All I ask is that you pass on at least one of your invitations (you get 3) to anyone else who leaves a comment below. Then we can share the wealth of this great new resource.