It is a new month and that means two things in the biblioblogosphere:
1. The Biblical Studies Carnival (xlviii) is published, this time by Doug Chaplin aka Clayboy. This carnival notes several of our posts in November (on Archaic Mark, and the first SBL reports highlighting Peter Head's paper on distigmai here and here and two other reports here and here).
For general information about the Biblical Studies Carnival see the carnival homepage maintained by Tyler Williams, who incidentally is hosting the next carnival in January 2010 on the same website. It is possible to nominate posts by sending suggestions to biblical_studies_carnival AT hotmail.com.
2. The Biblioblog Top 50 for November is out, and this blog is ranked no. 36, which is very good - we have readers! Our best ranking since this list started was #9, February-March 2009. Below I have listed our rankings:
October 2008 #22
November 2008 #26
December 2008 #36
January 2009 #17
February 2009 #9
March 2009 #9
April 2009 #13
May 2009 #20
June 2009 #25
July 2009 #28
August 2009 #28
September 2009 #54
October 2009 #35
November 2009 #36
One may get the impression that we lost a lot of readers since March, but that is not the case. Instead many new blogs, more or less related to biblical studies, are being added successively to the "Complete List of Biblioblogs" which means that the competition gets tougher and tougher. In fact, just looking at our own statistics for this year, the summer month July has unexpectedly been the best month so far, mabye because of long reports from conferences in Rome (SBL), London (Codex Sinaiticus) and Birmingham (VMR launch/Mingana collection).
These two monthly events, Biblical Studies Carnival and Biblioblog top 50 could be interpreted merely as narcissistic manifestations. On the other hand, they can be viewed positively as tools that draw reader's attention to: (1) good posts on good blogs and (2) good blogs with good posts.
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
There are good reasons that prevent this blog from rising very high:
ReplyDelete1) some readers will be put off by the technicality of material;
2) others will be put off by explicitly confessional material, or the blog's evangelical ethos.
That's fine. The blog is what it is. Though I haven't analyzed readership carefully, I would think that it has a relatively small number of people who follow it fairly closely.
However, it also has a lot of people who stumble across it because it now has so much material that it shows up on lots of searches. I've been watching the blog rise up the page on the Google search 'textual criticism'. It's now at no. 4. This rating is, I presume, essentially reached because of the quantity of material and the breadth of topics covered.
THanks Pete. I think that we have ca. 250-350 visitors every day. My guess is that more or less regular readers make up the larger part of them. And 80 persons explicitly follow, i.e., subscribe to the blog.
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