Congratulations!

My purpose here is not to complain about David’s tastes. What interests me is just what people do find interesting. I’m pretty much going to blog what I feel like irrespective of whether it gets read or not. In fact, I’ve found that my most read posts are almost universally ones that I would regard as a sort of filler. On that basis, this post should be popular, because I’m just rambling, though I’ve found things aren’t quite that predictable.

My own comment levels are down, though my readership has held pretty well. I suspect that has to do with the fact that I’m not blogging about the creation-evolution controversy nearly as frequently as I used to. Looking back, most of my comments were on those posts, followed closely by political ones.

I have always been surprised as well by what attracts links. It is very rare that a post I have labored over and lovingly read and re-read attracts many links. When I write unedited, dashing something off in the heat of the moment, it attracts much more attention. It also embarrasses me, because I’ll find the link, then look back at the post to discover just what I wrote, and I’ll find numerous errors.

The most interesting change over the last year, however, has been that this blog is not my primary blog any more, at least by readership. When I split this blog into three based on interests (Threads for general commentary, Participatory Bible Study blog for Bible study notes, often related to classes I’m currently teaching or to books I’m working on, and Jevlir for fun an fiction) I expected that this would be my main blog, I would have a few readers for the Bible study blog, and family and friends, if that, for the fiction blog. The latter is true, well, except that family and friends rarely read Jevlir, but I still have the sort of hit numbers that go with a “family and friends” type blog.

But Participatory Bible Study has climbed, while this one has remained steady or dropped a bit. The discouraging part of that is that most of the hits over there have to do with biblioblogging even though I rarely link to anything about that. One way to generate a bunch of visits is to write something about who is a biblioblogger or about one’s current ranking.

For a long time Participatory Bible Study wasn’t on the biblioblog list, which was fine by me. In fact, I didn’t think I fit the definition. But when I was added, my rank was fairly respectable (#7, last I checked). But it totally amazes me how many posts are written and links provided just to keep up with who has a higher Alexa ranking.

OK, so this is rambling, and perhaps blatantly linking into David’s post to generate some traffic, though I think my traffic is adequate to my purposes.

If you read this far, have fun! I’m amazed!

My only question is how a university allows a chair like that to remain unfilled for 60 years. Thanks is very much due to the person who discovered the omission.

There are really very few surprises here for me, though I am often surprised immediately after I post something at what attracts links.

I have made similar lists on my Jevlir Caravansary blog and my Participatory Bible Study blog. The surprise of the year for me is that of the three into which I split this blog a couple of years back, Participatory Bible Study is the most popular. I had expected this one to remain well ahead of the other two.

No, I’m not going to go into all the embarrassing youth stories. Suffice it to say that everyone realized then that Geoffrey was going to be a minister, and that never changed. I now attend his Wednesday Bible study on the Lectionary passages and really enjoy learning from him. He has become quite conversant with church history and especially early church fathers, and makes extensive use of that knowledge in teaching. Since my training and inclination starts from the opposite perspective, i.e. I tend to study the Bible as a piece of ancient near eastern literature, I find his study to be a nice complement to my own.

I have long tried to persuade Geoffrey to start blogging, and finally he has. His blog is at GeoffreyLentz.com, and I’d call attention to his thoughtful first post, What is a Preacher to Do?

He also just wrote a study guide for the Participatory Study Series published by my company, Energion Publications. You can find out more about this excellent new guide to the Gospel According to St. Luke on its catalog page.

His article includes such gems as:

But Google’s products (and profit) would look a lot different if, for example, the law said it had to obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index Web sites.

Wow! Amazing.

Of course, his argument is that it is only through special laws that sites like Google have done so well. I would argue that those laws are absolutely necessary to meet the needs of the information technology involved.

What journalists and other writers and artists need to do is learn to work effectively with new technology. Information will flow more freely; that ship has sailed. Learn to live with it.

(HT: The Agitator.)