Mediaboss Marketing

Shawn Bose and Justin Halloran studied religion as college undergrads, but it was their experience helping create 21st-century digital retailers such as eBay and UShip that brought them back to the topic of faith.

Being part of broad sites that customers perceive as less manipulated and closer to the ground level, the 30-somethings thought they could transfer the idea to religion create a huge site populated not by news, commentary or pop culture but by primary source material sacred texts, unedited sermons, religious music and civil discussion about them. The items would be put there mostly by participants, who would pay nothing, ideally making the site like a Wikipedia for religion. Last month, the pair launched Deily.org with hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, and this week The Post spoke with Bose about this merger of online retail and religion.

MB: How do you decide what constitutes primary content? In other words, whats pop culture and what isnt? Whats news and what isnt?

SB: In our experience, weve built marketplaces like UShip. Its a community-managed marketplace. We have no agenda of our own; theres no invisible hand. We just say the content has to be about religion, not intolerant, not hateful, and we allow for the community to flag anything thats inappropriate.

MB: But couldnt much in religious texts be considered inappropriate to someone?

SB: Were building up a big advisory board to help us with this.

MB: What motivated this?

SB: For many people, their religious experience has become passive. They go to church, temple, synagogue, listen to a sermon, digest and leave. Its one-way. We wanted to let people engage with content. How can a community come together to explain things to one another? This way they can deepen their faith or understanding. ... In the wake of everything thats happened in the past couple of weeks [including the attacks in Paris], we said: What is peoples understanding of religion? For most people, its what theyve been told or the news they get. Theres not a lot of self-discovery going on.

We know the best thing the Internet does is it lets more information get to more people. If we can share traditions, we feel that goes a long way to impacting people in a positive way

MB: Whats on the site now?

Original post:
Deily.org founders see their site as a kind of Wikipedia for faith