There have been a couple of voices speaking out against the Blogdom of God. The most notable and fair of these has been IreneQ. It is time for me to answer her and one or two others.
Firstly, on the point of blogs being too aggressively Christian, I think that some blogs written by Christians will be and indeed should be more explicitly Christian than others. This, like much in the blogosphere, is surely a matter of personal choice.
Joshua Claybourn is an excellent example in my mind of an eminently Christian blog that is not at first sight obviously Christian. He blogs about politics and the news, only to an insider is this clearly from a Christian point of view. I love it. He is also very successful and not afraid to state on his blog that he is the 200th most cited writer on the internet. Shameless self promotion? I don’t think so. He also links to a wide variety of blogs some Christian some not, without distinguishing between them.
The evangelical outpost on the other hand, is more explicitly Christian, with the very name giving the game away. For myself, I am somewhere in between as are many of us.
Oddly then, if The Blogdom of God was really about producing an evangelical ghetto, Joshua has joined the alliance, but the evangelical outpost has chosen not to. To me this shows that the blogdom of God is not about an exclusive clubbing together of Christian blogs, it is rather a way for some blogs that happen to be written by Christians to send some of their traffic to others of like mind. Whether to join or not is a decision for the owners of blogs to make and not anyone else.
Clearly, not everyone wants more traffic, but is it wrong that some of us do? Is it wrong that many of us want our Christian blogs to be read by other Christians and non-Christians alike? Are over 60 Christian bloggers shameless self-promoters for joining the blogdom, when 900 who have joined blogs4god are not? Indeed, Irene is a moderator over blogs4God, so it seems hard for me to understand her criticism of this new idea.
The desire for us to link to each other more in some way did not just come from me. Not everyone believes with Irene that we are in danger of creating an evangelical link farm. The statistical facts seem to be, at least in terms of the blogs that have thus far joined the Blogdom of God, that we are all much better at attracting traffic than we are at directing it to each other in links. Now that may or may not be a bad thing depending on your point of view. I happen to believe that a few more links between God blogs wouldn’t be a bad thing. If you agree you can join the blogdom if you want, if not you don’t have to.
Can You Hear Me Now?: stated about the blogdom of God "I have mixed thoughts about the proposal for creating an association of God Bloggers out here. It’s a good thing in that if someone is seeking information about religion they would find a large resource in one place but it also is a means for someone who doesn’t want to hear anything about Jesus or religion to side step and avoid one large group of Bloggers. ".
In actual fact Christian bloggers, especially ones like Joshua will be linked to from many different places. Just because a blog is listed on the Blogdom of God does not mean that it will not be listed elsewhere. So by clubbing together we do pass each others traffic around, but in fact we do something else as well.
Search engines and Google in particular work on a kind of democracy. This has been demonstrated well by the practice of Google bombing which I brought up not to advocate cheating this search engine but rather to make readers aware of how seriously Google takes blog links. Every link placed for any website acts like a vote for that website. This will make the site more likely to be found when searching for relevant keywords.
What is less well known is that any link which also includes keywords acts as a vote for that website to be linked with those keywords. Ironically enough, Irene herself seems to have benefited from this, probably simply by the fact she has a link to great blogs pointing to a page on her own site she now has 11th position on a google search for Great blogs . Try it now. In fact the very act of me posting this message on my blog may have put her up a little- I hope so! Is it so wrong for me to suggest to those that think Blogs4God (a site which I have less affiliation with than Irene) lists many great blogs might want to tell their readers and the search engines this fact? (Incidently, when I last checked Blogs4God’s ranking for the google search great blogs was somewhere under 100).
To those who say we should stay out of this link business altogether, I ask one question Do you vote in your county’s elections?. I hope the answer is yes although we believe that God chooses our rulers. It is not wrong to act responsibly and pay our part as net citizens in voting (by links) for the sites we like to read. I do not believe we should rather sit and wait to see what readers God sends our way. Of course you can play your part in this process without being in the Blogdom of God, and I mine by being in it.
On a broader issue, mainstream Christian belief has always held that when God decides that something is going to happen, he also decides how he wants it to happen, and that almost always includes a role for man in fulfilling his purpose. Someone told William Carey that God didn’t need his help to evangelise India. I am glad he didn’t listen, aren’t you?
So lets keep blogging on in peace and goodwill towards one another, OK?
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