David Ker is Bored

Well, at least he’s finding the blogosphere boring. He finds that there are only two interesting Christian bloggers left, James McGrath and Eddie Arthur. What’s interesting is that, while I don’t seem to generally agree with David as to what is interesting, I agree with him that those two bloggers are very interesting. I read everything they write, except for the stuff James writes about LOST.

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!