I am in shock. I am very concened that racism may in fact be too popular for my liking within the community of God bloggers. What evidence do I have for this? Well let me explain.
I have just ejected a popular blog from the Blogdom of God. This blog contained a steady stream of what I felt was nothing other than racism. I am incredibly grateful to the person who e-mailed me their concerns about the blog in question. Since the blog involved may not even have asked to be in the Blogdom, and I do not want a fight on my hands, I didnt even feel the need to e-mail the blog’s author. If you think you can guess which the blog was I would rather you didnt speculate publicly. I do not want to give the expelled blog any free attention.
The Blogdom remains my personal project and like it or not I reserve the right to include or exclude whoever I wish. I am very likely to take advice from an ad hoc group of prominent God bloggers if I am in any doubt about such a decision, however. I also welcome the advice of anyone who spots a blog which in their view shouldnt be in. Today’s situation is far from the norm, and I cannot remember the last time I felt it was necessary to do something similar.
As you can tell when it comes to the Blogdom of God I have always been very inclusive and am reluctant in the extreme to exclude anyone who claims allegiance to any of the many denominations out there. Other lists subcategorise the different types of “Christian” out there, many of these are associated with the Blogdom of God.
In fact the only real entry criteria is a desire to self-identify as a “God blogger”. I have been accused by many of being too tolerant! Even my open arms pollicy when it comes to lists of blogs has some limits, however! I am not even sure of the legality of some of the material that I read on the blog I just expelled.
What concerns me more than the nature of the blog involved, however, is that it had managed to obtain a remarkably high ranking within the Blogdom of God community listings (it was well within the top 500 out of some 4500 ranked!)
These rankings depend entirely on links being placed by other members of the group. So, it would seem to me that racism must be more prevalent within the Blogdom of God than I had previously hoped. Sadly, there appears to be no other way of explaining the facts before us, although I wish there was.
Despite the occasional quirks of NZ Bear’s system I have previously been impressed with the so-called “wisdom of crowds” that our little community has produced. There seems to me to be a better than chance likelihood that the most “popular” blogs chosen by a group of “God bloggers” are readable, interesting and largely “sound”- at least most of the time!
Democracy or the so-called “wisdom of crowds” seems to largely work well when it comes to blog link rankings- you may well be surprised at how much you like the majority of say the top 20 blogs. Indeed I would be surprised if any God blogger couldnt find at least one blog in the following list that they would like to link to and add to their regular reading list. There are some of these blogs that seem remarkably stable in their rankings, and of course other great blogs that pop in and out of the top twenty due to the quirks of the system. Popularity isnt everything, however and there are some fantastic blogs out there that few people seem to be linking to for some reason.
So for now, here are the current “Top 20”:
1. the evangelical outp
2. La Shawn Barber?
3. Hugh Hewitt
4. One Hand Clapping
5. Adrian’s Blog
6. ScrappleFace
7. Questions and Answer
8. Allthings2all
9. OrthodoxyToday.org B
10. Semicolon
11. JOLLYBLOGGER
12. The Dawn Patrol
13. Blogotional
14. Dunker Journal
15. In the Agora
16. :: The Minor Prophet
17. THEOOZE – conversati
18. Pontifications
19. Logicus bLogicus
20. Always Thirsty
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