ldsWebguy

We have posted online additional photos from general conference. There is a link to them on the Ensign home page, where you’ll also find a link to experiences from people who attended conference.

An English audio recording of the manual Preach My Gospel is now available in MP3 format in English on LDS.org.

You can access all the Church’s audio files from the LDS.org audio page.

The Church is now beginning to provide audio recordings in various languages for the manual Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, Jr. The following are the languages and the scheduled dates for posting the last of the MP3 audio files on LDS.org. Files for many of the chapters are already online.

English: completed (We also have a podcast for the English audio files at webfeeds.lds.org.)
Spanish, Russian, Korean, Mandarin: May 30, 2008
Portuguese, French, Cantonese, German, Italian: June 5, 2008
Japanese: June 12, 2008

You can access all the audio files from the LDS.org audio page. You can also access them from the individual chapters in the manual by clicking Listen on the format bar above the chapter text.

The General Conference Ensigns are on their way to subscribers this week.

Elder Paul V. Johnson counsels us to “Decide now to make general conference a priority in your life. Decide to listen carefully and follow the teachings that are given. Listen to or read the talks more than once to better understand and follow the counsel. By doing these things, the gates of hell will not prevail against you, the powers of darkness will be dispersed from before you, and the heavens will shake for your good.” (Paul V. Johnson, “The Blessings of General Conference,” Ensign, Nov. 2005, 52)

If you don’t have a subscription to the Ensign, you can order one at LDScatalog.com. You can even get a subscription with 2 copies of each conference issue. You can also get audio and video files at generalconference.lds.org.

We have now registered podcasts of the April 2008 General Conference in the iTunes store. We need people to search for them, comment about them, and use them so that their in-store ranking will improve, making it easier for people to find them.

Access the MP4 video podcast

Access the MP3 audio podcast

When you click the links above, it will open iTunes on your computer to display the podcast.

We have now posted online the text, audio, and video from the April 2008 General Conference in up to 82 languages.

You can also subscribe to these conference materials by e-mail or iTunes or any other audio player or RSS feed aggregator. (The link to the Web feeds subscription page is in the footer of the LDS.org home page.)

There is an interesting article in today’s USA Today about religious podcasts.

• “…podcast technology is opening the doors to a wider variety of religious teaching than ever before, available on demand and delivered automatically to the computers of a growing number of Americans hungry for spirituality.”
• Even small churches can use podcasts to reach large audiences. More than 1 million sermons are accessed monthly from SermonAudio.com, a site that small churches can use to distribute their sermons. The site is now branching out to allow people to access their sermon library of nearly 170,000 sermons by iPhones and iPods.
• “A survey last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more people used the Internet to look for religious and spiritual information than to download music, participate in online auctions or visit adult websites.”
• GodTube, a Christian alternative to YouTube, has about 2 million users a month. It plans to launch a program that will allow churches to set up their own social networking home pages and post slide shows and audio.
• Experts expect that the easy access to religious teaching from podcasts probably won’t keep people from church, just as TV and radio didn’t hurt church attendance.
• In some cases, a good podcast might be better than a traditional passive church experience. If a person goes to church and passively listens to a talking head give a sermon, then leaves, a podcast experience might be more engaging.
• WorshipIdeas offers tips for contemporary church worship leaders.

Funeral services for President Gordon B. Hinckley were held Saturday, February 2. Audio and video files are now available online.

About one million Portuguese-speaking members of the Church can now study the LDS triple combination on the Internet in their native tongue. The Portuguese version of the LDS Scriptures Internet Edition was just released.

The Portuguese version has footnotes, study helps, maps, photographs, and the ability to mark scriptures. Extensive proofreading was done to ensure the accuracy of the text. The Portuguese text version of the scriptures joins the downloadable compressed audio files that were placed online in 2007.

In an effort to help more members have access to the scriptures for personal study as well as lesson preparation, the Church has previously placed English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish versions of the triple online at scriptures.lds.org. The LDS scriptures in more than two dozen languages are currently being converted for use online.