WordBloom

When we went down to the main BibleTech conference room on the first morning, there were only two tables for vendors. One of them was for a web application called WordBloom. Keith and I were intrigued by what looked like a visual thesaurus on screen and made a note to come back and find out more later. We ended up visiting with Doug Burrier, the owner of WordBloom. Doug is the energetic pastor of Northwest Church in Atlanta, and a warm and personable man. Doug had a vision of creating something like the visual thesaurus with Bible knowledge. and during the past year or so he brought together a team and built this application that allows you to explore the conceptual world of the Bible through a graph of connections between Scripture verse references and topics. Every time you search a topic or reference, the application displays a "word bloom," which is Doug's term for a network of connections to related terms. If you click another term in the bloom, it becomes the center of a new bloom. As you explore, at any point you can gather what you've found into studies, which can become the basis for your personal exploration of Scripture. A personal WordBloom subscription is $36/year. I'm looking forward to having more opportunity to explore this outstanding application.