When Blogs Collide
One thing for sure: we regular bloggers are a self-absorbed lot. You kind of have to be to keep churning out this stuff week after week with the hope that others actually want to go through the trouble of clicking their mice and reading it. When one spends so much time navel-gazing, one is bound to find some lint. One of the favorite pieces of our own navel lint we bloggers love to pick at is how easy it is to write anything about anyone in the blogosphere because we never have to meet them face to face.
However, if you pursue blogging long enough, you’ll eventually be drawn to meet and greet others of your religious persuasion (not Christianity…the religion of blogging, silly!). So it was with mixed trepidation and excitement that I responded last week to an invitation from an evangelical blogging legend: David Wayne, aka “The Jolly Blogger.” David consistently ranks so high in the Christian Blogging Ecosphere that my blog can’t even see the bottom of his shoes. Seems his Jolliness was going to be at a conference at my seminary and wanted to connect for lunch. We made the date.
The first surprise was a surprise for both of us. We realized that we’d already met and chatted briefly before. The second surprise was mine, but shouldn’t have been so surprising: the Jolly Blogger is….jolly that is. Not in a hoho Santa Clause sort of way, but more in line with the C. S. Lewis quote that adorns his blog’s masthead:
Grace substitutes a full, childlike, and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become “Jolly Beggars.”
We talked about how we each got into blogging and what challenges being a public blogger presents to our “real life” rolls as pastor (David) and seminary student (me). It was our own little GodBlogCon ‘06 right there in the Westminster Cafe.
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April 30th, 2006 at 7:48 pm
David and I shared an elevator ride together at GA last year - my brush with blogging greatness.
May 6th, 2006 at 12:55 am
What is his ranking? I can’t find it. BTW, TLB is not an indicator of greatness. Both of my blogs rank as Mammals. Reformed Chicks Blabbing rank is 107 and Life Under the Sun is 224 and both are pretty insignificant blogs.
May 6th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Jollyblogger is not quite as high as I thought. Currently at 518, he’s a “Large Mammal.” Still much higher ranking than my current “Adorable Little Rodent” at 2559.
TLB doesn’t indeed tell you how popular your blog is “out there” (i.e., in terms of how many people are reading it). It ranks simply by counting all the current links (on their front pages) from blogs within the TLB “ecosphere” to other member blogs (i.e., links from a weblog to itself are ignored). This includes links within posts, and ‘permanent’ links in a weblog’s blogroll. Remember, however, that the Ecosystem only counts links from blogs that are also registered in the Ecosystem. If you have links coming from a blog that isn’t registered, you may add it.
So it’s really only a measure of how popular your blog is within a defined community of active bloggers. Technorati ranking works pretty much the same way (counting links from other blogs) except that it draws from a much larger sample. So my current Technorati rank is 51,223. Also, Technorati weights the value of each link according to the Technorati ranking (”authority”) of the blog making the link.
I’d love to see a ranking system that takes into account your current page views as well as links. Links from other bloggers are important, but it reflects the now outdated original purpose of weblogs: places to post links to other things on the web one thought were noteworthy. Most blogs today are more like public journals or e-magazines, thus I think page views are more indicative of a blogs “value” to the general public. Of course, the downside of this is that most blogs’ ranking would fluctuate wildly from day to day.
May 7th, 2006 at 7:12 am
True, about the fluctuation. Though they might be able to use an average.
Blogrolls have thrown off the whole ranking system. You have very small blogs rank very high if they blog is on enough blogrolls.
My technorita ranking is 2,435 for Reformed Chicks and 4,031 for Life Under the Sun.