If you’ve been hanging around here a while, you may have got a few whiffs of a “super-secret” Web site I’ve been working on. I’m not quite ready to spill the beans, but I can give you a few hints.

For starters, I am a big believer in content aggregation. There are many well-established sites out there that host user content, and sometimes your own site is the best host. When it comes to blogging, video, podcasts, and so forth, it’s pretty hard to reinvent the wheel and make a splash these days. However, the pain point has shifted from how to host content to how to find quality content. Just go to YouTube.com sometime and you’ll see what I mean. Finding stuff that is meaningful to you and actually challenges your mind and your spirit is hard. Too hard.

So, with the idea of aggregation in mind, let’s move on to social networking. Social networking is awesome. We can quibble about how it might best be implemented, and some folks are hesitant to jump on board, but it’s definitely a concept that is in the process of reshaping the Internet. The problem I see is, again, that there’s a pain point where social networking and content aggregation aren’t always meshing very well. Facebook is a very different animal from Digg, and it’ll probably stay that way for some time.

Finally, I want to talk about Christianity. I hate to be blunt, but the Christian Web pretty much sucks. Sure, there are plenty of great church sites, and some ministries have done a lot of cutting edge stuff, and let’s not discount the growing swath of excellent Christian blogs — but by and large, there’s no great design or innovation going on that’s bringing all of the latest Web 2.0 and social networking inventions to bear and wrapping it all up in a package worthy of a TechCrunch nomination.

To summarize my post, I see a need for a service that solves this equation:

content aggregation + social networking + spiritual development - sucktitude = sweet

Interestingly enough, the first part of the name of this project starts with the answer to that equation. I leave it up to you to guess the rest of the name, as that revelation will have to wait a little while longer. In the meantime, I encourage you to leave your thoughts or any ideas you may have in regards how Christians can utilize Web 2.0 to the fullest extent. See you soon!