Christian Influence on the Blogosphere

It seems that a lot of Christian blogrolls have been formed lately. One is the Blogdom of God. Another is the Church Directory. There is also a Reformed Blogroll and a Christian Women's Blogroll. There are more of course and these are only a sample. And of course there is some overlap between these different rolls.

I belong to two of these, the Blogdom of God and Evangelical Outpost's Church Directory. I have also opted out of certain rolls I might qualify for, but didn't want to take part in, like the Reformed Blogroll. I have noticed that my blog has really jumped on the TTLB Ecosystem because of the two I have joined. I wondered if the Christian community might be artificially inflating our importance in the overall rankings. I also worried a little that the Christian blogging community might acquire a bit of a bad name because of this.

Parableman has responded to allegations of impropriety. He gives a good philosophical analysis of how the Christian community is still acting within the spirit and letter of the Ecosystem rules. After all lots of non-christian bloggers (particularly political bloggers) are members of multiple blog alliances as well. Examples of this are people in a State blogroll (or two), a pro-life alliance, and another Republican roll. Its the same darn thing and he has a point.

Now these kind of arguments are great, but I don't find them especially convincing anymore. I've been in way too many arguments about "the spirit of the rules" with too many people that were abusing them. They had some philosophical structure in their own minds which justified their actions and my interpretation did nothing to help the situation. Eventually it just boils down to who has the best rhetoric and popularity.

Fortunately Adrian Warnock takes a different tack. His statistics show that the Christian blogosphere as judged by the Blogdom of God (which Adrian runs) is not, on average, over-represented in comparison to many other secular blog alliances. As I said, philosophy and rhetoric doesn't often float my boat, but hard numbers do my conscience good. I suppose it's the engineer in me.