How are faith blogs and the blogosphere doing?

Growth

Blogging continues to grow, but that isn’t a surprise to those who participate. Technorati estimates that the blogosphere doubles every five and a half months. New blog platforms, new tools to track blogs and RSS were dominate this year and pod-casting (audio blogging) came into it’s own.

The explosive growth of blogs essentially happened outside North America.

1) Blog Platforms
2) Blog networks
3) Spam
4) Faith blogs

The Blog Herald has been tracking the growth of weblogs both for corporate and media players and for the average person. As technology improves, as hardware becomes more accessible and affordable, more people are discovering blogging.

There are probably 100 million blogs world-wide. The most explosive growth has been in Asian countries - the post breaks down estimates by regions and countries.

One of the more interesting observations is the US. Counting blogs is difficult because of the numbers of platforms, languages etc. It is estimated there are between 20 to 50 million blogs in the US and I think it is probably true many are abandoned.

Most blogs still last about 3 months for a variety of reasons.

Platforms

This can be difficult to pin down because more often than not the figures released are by the platform owners.

Xanga: 40 million Mostly widely used platform for the 13-29 year olds. It’s free, as most blog platforms are, and as with MySpace, has networking and community oriented features.

MySpace: 30 million. MySpace is a private blog platform and is not monitored by blog traffic sites. Like Xanga it is a free diary space and is largely populated by teens.

MySpace made news this year when a Pennsylvania love struck teen murdered his underage girlfriend’s parents and the hue and cry started again about the dangers of blogging.

Since users are a younger demographic, it’s sad to see a site like MySpace deaths - a kind of online obituary of bloggers that have died in this community the past year. The majority of deaths are below 20 years of age, and the majority died in automobile accidents, often involving alcohol.

This obit-site is hosted on Live Journal and because of complaints had to be temporarily shut down and re-formatted. You can see what it looked like from this cache.

MSN Spaces: Estimates range from 18 to 25 million.

Blogger: (bought by Google) About 15 million. Because Blogger has been one of the free platforms around the longest, it is also causing a fair bit of consternation because of it’s attraction for spammers. It’s an easy platform to get started on, and it’s easy to spam others from. Many people start out on Google, discover the discipline and addictiveness of this hobby and move on to other platforms.

SixApart: SixApart has been the subject of talk from hard core bloggers this year because of the behavior of Mena Trott, one of the founders. This company offers Movable Type (free and paid) Live Journal (free) and TypePad (paid) which has also gotten it’s fair share of attention because of technical problems.

It is estimated 11 million bloggers use SixApart products.

Blog Networks

It is estimated there are about 50 blog networks going.
What is a blog network?  I don’t really know. In it’s history of blogs, Wikipedia defines a network as:

Blogs are different from forums or newsgroups. Only the author or authoring group can create new subjects for discussion on a blog. A network of blogs can function like a forum in that every entity in the blog network can create subjects of their choosing for others to discuss. Such networks require interlinking to function, so a group blog with multiple people holding posting rights is now becoming more common.

What I do know is a couple of about the approximately 50 known blog networks made news this year. I see blog networks as blog-malls geared toward niche readers (ie: photography, food, entertainment, gaming, technology, etc) with the main purpose being an umbrella where advertisers can target interested readers.

Networks exist to make money for bloggers and advertisers. One of the two that caught some attention this year was Weblogs,Inc. (97+ or so blogs) when it was sold to AOL for over 20 million dollars.

Networks look to me to be a commercial equivalent of blogrolls and aggregators.
The second network that caught attention was what critics and wags refer to as the heavenly 70 - Pajamas Media. This endeavor is funded by venture capitalists and because the bloggers are US political conservatives with a token blog from elsewhere thrown in, blog watchers have had a field day.

Individually most of the blogs in this network have done well on their own, collectively it’s become quite another story. It’s billed as an attempt at citizen journalism, bouncing off MSM. (blog talk for main stream media) I think there was an over-estimation by the owners for the appetite of readers for more political commentary, and may wind up being one of the network casualties that are going to occur as the market gets saturated. There are enough aggregators and blogs of this genre for those that care to read them.

Spam

The more blog platforms that become available to the average user, the more networks, blogging tools and economics play into blogging, the more spammers take advantage.

I did my fair share of complaining about being buried by various types of spam this year, and I am merely one of millions faced with spam blogs, link farm blogs, trackback spam, blog email spam and comment spam. It is estimated 10 to 15 percent of blogs have been set up on a hit and run basis to make life online miserable for the rest of us. Add in direct marketers and it gets very messy for bloggers. This year I saw a fair bit of religious spam hit the in-box, and it came from professional religious organizations in the US. I cannot for the life of me understand what the organizations and individuals think they accomplish targeting blogs, by the time most of us have been online for awhile, we’ve figured out how to direct their offering to the trash bin. As fast as patches come out for platforms, spammers find a way around them.

Have god-blogs networked?

Faith-blogs have not yet networked into advertising and economic streams that I’ve been able to see, but protestant evangelicals continue to divide along political and theological lines in the US. In their own way they mirror what is going on in the country. Faith blogs outside the US don’t seem to have quite the divisiveness to them, that has been something I’ve noticed since I started BDBO.

No one knows how many faith blogs are coming online because they aren’t an important enough demographic to warrant serious study yet and the internet isn’t organized to count or study in a viable way.

There have been shifts this year. Crosswalk, a professional evangelical company (Salem media) that has been online for years, has added pseudo-blogs for US protestant leaders.

Christianity Today which has one of the longest running weblogs has added a couple of blogs. The Leadership blog - Out of Ur, and an ethics blog. As well, CT’s main weblog has mentioned bloggers a few times this past year.

Well known long time faith blogs continue to thrive as new ones come online such as Beliefnet’s, blogroll (Blog Heaven) and The Wibsite group of blogs out of the UK.

World Magazine is another example of an evangelical enterprise that has added a roster of blogs and bloggers to cater to the US market, there has been no indication whether the bloggers are being paid or if they plan to move into an economic model with the blogs.

Many faith bloggers use individual advertising to help pay for their hobby, I’m wondering if we’ll see more professional christian businesses start to place ads on blogs.

blogs4God, a blog portal that had dominated since 2002 ran into technical problems this year and resurrected on a new platform called Drexal.

Real Live Preacher became well known and he also switched over to the Drexal platform to run a more community oriented blog.

Focus on the Family’s lobby arm, The Family Research Council found blogging and paid for bloggers to attend it’s second Justice Sunday II. Despite the lack of success the lobby group has promised a stellar lineup of bloggers for Justice Sunday III January 9th, 2006.

Evangelicals put together a GodBlogConvention held at Biola University in October and didn’t do the idea or others any favours when some of the organizers attacked critics. I was surprised at some of the behind the scenes behavior, let alone the-never-admit-you-are wrong online behaviour of a few. The approximately 100 convention attendees had fun, rumours are plans are going ahead with another one, possibly in the same location and with the same players.

It’s time to stop thinking about trying to be “A” list blogs and start thinking about being source blogs - blogs that provide steady and reliable content for readers and other bloggers.

A new-to-me label (progressives) began to make their foray into the US political/religious blogging scene with blogs like Street Prophets.

Gospelcom’s people started their own blog.

Baptists in the US got into quite the flame war over some issue that mattered a great deal to them. An essayist named Michael Spencer who is a Southern Baptist minister, broke with tradition a bit too much for the liking of some when he posted a confessional essay.
Well.
Time to make blogger bones.
This had to be the evangelical flame war of the year.
A pile of Baptist opinion and some serious hurt later, the essay got taken off line, the adrenaline junkie theological purists got their hit spikes, things were said that won’t help anyone heal, and those of us that watch blogging settled in to wait for the next fundamentalist/evangelical blowup. Blogging being what it is, it is merely a matter of time. It wouldn’t hurt to read Solyent’s Green series of three posts called Dealing with Disunity.

The evangelical owner of an aggregator called The Blogdom of God stopped scrapping links (taking blog URL’s) when he caught some flack and a lot of work. The idea was to increase traffic and prestige at a blog ranking system called The Truth Laid Bear, but that’s not how blogs function. Trickle down theory didn’t happen on a large scale and there are only so many hours in a day. I had an opportunity to talk to Dr. Adrian Warnock on messenger. He’s a funny and smart guy who learned a hard lesson. People take technology personally and he learned some of us bloggers have egos as big as rock stars. I suspect spammers hit this ambitious aggregator just as hard as some of us disgruntled by being scrapped gave Adrian our public two cents in posts and comments. He’s worked hard this past year to clean things up.

Emergent church bloggers discovered they were interesting or disturbing enough to get their own counter-blog called emergentno. Rather like the Baptist flame war, the back and forth ran on lots of adrenaline, discussion and arguments. It got to the point emergentno wound up with a counter site called Emergent What? with the bloggers that set it up deciding to be polite and respectful. Scott McKnight wrote a year end piece that looks at civility, or rather the lack thereof in many of the protestant blogs and wonders about counter-blogging. Messy Christian took a look at the Jews for Jesus lawsuit that surfaced this December and at the blogger who is dismayed Google is being targeted by an organization looking for attention. There remain pearls of wisdom and common sense in the blogosphere.

The Evangelical Outpost won a Weblog Award for his blog, and Ganns Dean of Superblessed won a Philippine Blogging Award. A University of Toronto Anglican seminarian won a Canadian Blog Award.

This is not the year faith blogs died, they are thriving, whether they be protestant, catholic, orthodox, jewish or people posting of any faith. Our various cultures and age groups are well served by excellent larger group communities and zines such as ChristDot, The Ooze, Relevant, Resonate, Spero News and The Revealer. Religion watching is thriving on blogs such as GetReligion in the US and Religion News Blog from the Netherlands.

The term ‘god-blog’ was merely co-opted by some eager evangelical fundamentalist Republican bloggers who seemed to struggle to understand God doesn’t fit into their agenda, and that people of faith around the world, online, and blogging, cannot be dictated to by enthusiasm or politics. If fundamentalists need the term god-blog and need to use it to exclude anyone outside the parameters of the uniqueness of southern fundamentalism, no one is the worse off for it. A few years ago the term ‘holy huddle’ was used by bloggers from various countries attempting to discuss the lead up to the Iraq war. As faith bloggers became more comfortable online, and communities grew, most withdrew from the political spin and discussions, attempts at exclusion theology, and denominational divides that matter to a sometimes a rather noisy few.

The kingdom of God is diverse, and those that blog about God and faith have had their share of sorrows like any community or set of online communities do. From everything I’ve seen faith bloggers continue to carry on with tenacity and steadiness literally all over the world.

I went back in my meandering this month to the year 2001 when a blogroll was noticed by a US columnist named John Leo. The blogroll was started by an Australian reporter named Martin Roth and by the time he passed it on to a US computer programmer in July 2002, it became blogs4God - one of the first blog portals.

Many faith blogs, blogrolls or various sizes and countless aggregators later, how are some of the first group of bloggers doing?

Of the 251 blogs in my original community (give or take a number) 104 have moved on to other things. Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard recently wrote an article for First Things called “God and the Internet” and in it, John Mark Reynolds is quoted as saying there were “literally millions” of god-blogs.
Not true.
There are thousands.
Many are happy journalling on private style platforms, many aren’t restless and eager to make a name for themselves in this strange sub-division. Many bloggers don’t enter the rough and tumble of god-blogging, prefering to speak/post quietly, and are not interested in using blog tools to push their way to the top of where ever some else says the top is.
Many bloggers don’t wonder as I do how faith blogs are doing in the grander scheme of the blogosphere or push to get attention.

I was oddly surprised for reasons I don’t fully understand when I looked back to 2002 and the roots of my blog experience. To see over half the blogs still going strong, and still refusing to be divided along political, denominational or cultural divides was encouraging. The kindness and wisdom I’ve been the receipient of and witness to with faith bloggers and readers, is not being drowned out by flame wars, politics and jockeying for position. The vast majority of faith bloggers aren’t interested in winning, they are interested in being witnesses. And God bless them for it.

This continues to be a humbling and fun hobby, I’m really looking forward to 2006 online. BDBO is getting tweaked a bit and technically eased into something managable for me, the proverbially technically clumsy blogger.:^) I think you’ll notice the sparkle when the techs are done.

I asked Tim Samoff where he thinks faith blogs were at this year, and where we may be going. Funky Dung chipped in with a list of some of the best posts from St. Blog’s this year.
If you have thoughts about faith blogs and your experiences as a blogger and reader of blogs this past year, leave a comment, leave a link to your post below.
Any thoughts on where 2006 will take us?

Blog on!