Tag: blog rankings

  • One hundred seventy-seven

    It was really cool to find out that my blog was indexed and currently ranks as #177 of the top #200 church blogs. Always nice to be recognized- thanks Kent.

    Based on how he measures, there are two things you can do to help me move up on that list.

    First, subscribe to my blog via Google Reader.

    Add to Google

    Second, if you have a blog, tumblr, postereus site, or anything like that, it actually does help both my page rank & Yahoo links ranking if you have a link to me somewhere.

    More importantly…

    It’s really cool to see the noticeable addition of youth ministry blogs into the Church Relevance rankings. Here’s a list of youth ministry bloggers on the list, with their YS ranking in parenthesis.

    To have 10 youth ministry blogs in the top 200 is really cool. I’m excited about that.

    As I’ve said about the YS rankings. There is room for you.  You have a voice– speak your mind!

  • Ah, Subjectivity

    “Subjectivity” has been the word of my week.

    On Tuesday, I released a list of the top 20 youth ministry blogs.

    Just like people argue incessantly about sports polls– there has been a lot of discussion about the release of my poll. Thank goodness no one gives these folks time on ESPN. I’d go nuts!

    I knew it would create discussion, debate, and maybe even some sour grapes. I even warned the call center at work that they may get some calls complaining. (Which never happened) But I felt strongly about making the poll public. Transparency, right?

    I knew/hoped/even prayed that by publishing the list it would make the entire genre better. At least that’s my working theory.

    Like it or not, the youth ministry blog genre has been fading for the past 1-2 years. Several of the bigger names (some of which are friends of mine)  have either stopped blogging, slowed significantly, or started to morph their blog from a blog to more of a resource/ad driver site. And I thought, subjectively, that if I drew some attention to the genre it just might wake up the once vibrant community.

    Of course the poll is subjective. It’s created by a human. 66% included a composite of publicly available stats, all of which are dependent on the individual blog being set up correctly and pinging those ranking sites. (More subjectivity) Additionally, the method included a 33% weighting specifically called “influence.” I took the top 50 blogs statistically and pushed out a survey asking 20 of the top 50 to rank each blog on a scale of 1-10 for who they thought had the most influence in youth ministry. (Can it get more subjective?) I even asked that group, “Who is missing from the top 50?”

    Only 2 new blogs were suggested, neither of great statistical influence.

    So there was a bit of subjectivity in every arena. Even in the 100 or so blogs who got indexed there was subjectivity since it was limited to my ability to find the blogs in the first place.

    This is the nature of any poll or rankings. There is criteria, but the creation of the criteria is subjective no matter what. My hope is, just like in sports, enough people will want to move up and the end result is that it makes the genre better.

    Competition isn’t always bad, is it? Doesn’t it, on some level, make people try harder to be better?

    Bottom line: I’m loving the discussion. And I love the fact that people are thinking about youth ministry blogs once again.