The Biblioblog Top 50 has a new home, here.
This list used to be kept by the pseudonymous NT Wrong, who now seems to have withdrawn from the blogosphere. Now the list is run by the Biblical Floccinaucinihilipilification Society (”the BFS”). Perhaps "NT Wrong" is their chairman. Anyway, according to the site "Floccinaucinihilipilification" is defined in Oxford English Dictionary as "the action or habit of estimating as worthless."
On the Biblioblog Top 50 every biblical studies blog, or ‘biblioblog’, is ranked each month according to the total number of unique visitors. The Number One Biblioblogger for the month of January 2009 is James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix.
The foremost among "big shakers and movers" for the month is Dave Black (Dave Black Online) who went up 17 places to number 4.
The ETC blog (this blog) went up 19 places to number 17. The ranking is based on statistics provided by Alexa. According to Alexa, the percent of global Internet users who have visited this blog has went up 90% in the last three months. That sounds much. I don't know if these figures can be entirely trusted, but, in any case, it is nice to see the positive trend in terms of visitors.
A forum for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages to discuss its manuscripts and textual history from the perspective of historic evangelical theology.
- Contributors
- Peter M. Head (ed)
- Tommy Wasserman (ed)
- P. J. Williams, and others
I've seen these rankings for a while and they don't seem - intuitively - to correspond to either quality, popularity and/or commenting trends. I reckon the rankings are as much a spoof as the blog on which they appear.
ReplyDeleteI agree, they are suspect in some regards. On the other hand, regarding the positive trend for this blog, the data corresponds with our "site meter" where I have noticed a significant increase of visitors and page views in the last couple of months.
ReplyDeleteAs explained on the new blogsite, the rankings are based on total users. It follows that the rankings do not correspond to 'quality' or directly to 'commenting trends'. The rankings do not, and cannot credibly, attempt to measure such subjective things as 'quality'. The rankings are sourced from the publicly available statistics provided by Alexa, which you are quite entitled to record yourself, so as to check the results. Of course, the rankings are subject to the accuracy of Alexa, but Alexa has to date provided a by and large trustworthy mesure of the popularity of the biblioblogs involved - which 'intuitively' (yet, from an informed intuition) has correctly recorded noted increases and decreases in the pupolarity of vaious biblioblogs.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, if anybody wishes to review the calculation spreadsheet used to calculate the rankings over the month of February, please email us when the rankings are released, and we will be happy for you to do so.
Biblioblog Top 50 (ex NT Wrong?), I remember that when a previous top list was released a while ago, Jim Davila's website was not included on that list, which seemed very strange. I think Mark Goodacre also noted this. Was there an explanation?
ReplyDeleteThe user ratings for Davila's blog are quite dependent on interesting stories in the news. It usually does very well when there are popular archaeological stories around. But in January its user ratings accordingly went just below the top 50. It is at the same level this month, so far. But if a Jerusalem digger uncovers a tomb marked Yeshua ben Yosef, it could end up rather higher on the list.
ReplyDeleteAnd, as I said, the Top 50 is a popularity ranking of biblical studies bloggers, not an indication of quality. As such, it is something that is both fun and mildly interesting for most bibliobloggers and their readers. As it so happens, and Davila's Paleojudaica is for a couple of months the one notable exception that proves the rule, the Top 50 regularly includes the big biblical studies blogs near the top of the list (including Evangelical Textual Criticism, of course). Quality still wins through in the long run.
Thanks "Biblioblog Top 50" for the clarification.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt due to the influx of those who follow James White's ministries!
ReplyDeleteJ.C.B.