A lot of people have noticed that the top 10 Christian blogs here on MandM are ranking higher in the general rankings over time. It’s been suggested that the rankings themselves might be responsible themselves for this phenomenon, by making more people aware of the Christian blogs out there.

So I thought I’d put that hypothesis to the test.

I used Tumeke! Ranking data to trace blogs over the past year. I noted the rank of the blogs included in the MandM rankings, from the time they were first used in those rankings, not when they first appeared on Tumeke!.

I used Tumeke! for several reasons.

1. It’s more respected
2. It’s been operating longer
3. Halfdone rankings have tended to favour Christian blogs for some unknown reason. Thus the Tumeke! Rank becomes a “tougher” test of popularity
4. Basically, I’m too lazy to do both!

The first issue we have is that the data is problematic. New blogs come on the scene, old blogs fall off. So I tweaked the data a bit.

1. Removed MacDoctor – he scored very highly before being placed on the “Christian” list. I think most people would agree that him being a Christian isn’t the primary reason why people read his blog. So he’s not really
2. Removed Backchat Café and NZ Debate, both of whom started and ended within the survey period.

Charting what’s left, we come up with this (I’ve divided the Max score by 10 to keep it in the scale).

So the number of Christian blogs has increased. Also, as the blog rankings have grown the lowest ranked blog has pushed out lower and lower – i.e. if 300 blogs are ranked, clearly the lowest ranked Christian blog is likely to be in the 200s. No surprises with either of those. The average looks interesting, but we need to dig further.

Here’s the 11 blogs that averaged the highest score.

Note the highest score in a Christian blog that didn’t make it onto this chart is 62. That was by Samuel Dennis back in November, so our method didn’t eliminate any good starters thus making the trend look better.

The most impressive improvements over the year have been MandM and the Beretta blog. Both have come from very uninspiring rankings to sweep into the top 40.

Contra Celsum also made some good gains. I’ve highlighted these blogs to make their movement easier to see.

Not all blogs gained during the year. Kiwi Polemicist slipped after almost making it to 60. The Briefing room dropped right off after February.

But what has really gotten the attention of those watching the Christian rankings is the number of blogs that are now in the top 50/60. This can be clearly seen in this chart, with a mere 3 in the top 40 at the beginning. Now however, there are 8, 5 of those being in the top 40. That’s all in spite of TBR’s dropping off the pace.

Some of us have suspected that this is due to improving scores. That’s partially true, with Beretta and MandM improving drastically, but mostly it’s been due to already good Christian blogs getting included in the stats, and other blogs such as MacDoctor and Keeping Stock identifying or being identified as Christian.

Speaking of MacDoctor, in spite of his exclusion from the analysis, he is the only one who consistently makes it into the Tumeke! top 20.

Something for us all to work on, eh?

There is also our button,

<a href="http://www.mandm.org.nz/2009/06/christian-blog-ranking-report-for-april.html"><img style="PADDING-RIGHT: 2px; PADDING-LEFT: 2px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 2px; PADDING-TOP: 2px" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0E68LtPk7D0/STS2MM1X9lI/AAAAAAAAAH8/yvzk8JNDwzc/S180/10sqmm.jpg" border="0" /></a>

I have copied the top 10 below, the other 250 or so can be seen here.

“the state of Israel was created ‘on the pretext of Jewish suffering’ from the second world war”The authors at Tumeke are politically hard-left activists; most notable is Tim Selwyn, who was convicted and served prison time for sedition after he threw an axe through the window of the Prime Minister’s electorate office. In addition, the Tumeke blog publishes a lot of material that we disagree with, which is routinely badly argued for and poorly supported. Not surprisingly, this site does not feature on our blogroll. The only thing that Tumeke publishes that we find of interest is their blog rankings. They helpfully publish these on a sub-blog, Tumeke NZ Blogosphere.

The current boycott is over some inflammatory remarks Tim Selwyn made in response to the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s remarks at the recent UN’s anti-racism conference.

Tim cited The Guardian who reported that

…[protestors] heckled Ahmadinejad after he branded Israel a “cruel and oppressive racist regime”. He said the state of Israel was created “on the pretext of Jewish suffering” from the second world war.

Tim then said,

Problem is though, what he said, it’s all true isn’t it? The Jewish State is set up for Jews – quite specifically to benefit them as a race and a religion – and they carry out massacres in refugee camps (like they did earlier this year) in order to carry out the colonial/land confiscation/occupation/subjugation template upon which Zionism has been practiced. That’s all true isn’t it – no matter how you cut it. So he said it at the right place but he said it at the wrong time – Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day gave the extra pressure on Poland and Germany to cave. [Emphasis added]

We can definitely see how this is inflammatory. The phrase “it’s all true” suggests that Tim agrees with everything Ahmadinejad said, including the statement about a “pretext” of Jewish suffering. However you could read Tim as specifying the charge of Israel being a racist state as the element he agrees with (a highly questionable and extreme statement). What the all applies to is ambiguous and could be interpreted either way.

We are left uncertain whether Tim is a holocaust denier or not; and uncertain that, if he is, what that requires us to do. We have not seen any evidence to suggest that he is a holocaust promoter. That said, we have seen enough to stand firm in our decision to not add Tumeke to our blogroll and to continue to have little time for the content of their blog; we will not be offering their authors any guest posts in the near future.

However, we fail to see that a link between featuring on Tumeke’s blog rankings and endorsing the content on Tumeke’s site has been established; the suggestion that MandM featuring on the blog stats on the sub-blog Tumeke Blogosphere amounts to MandM being complicit in or endorsing the comments make on the political blog Tumeke doesn’t follow.

Given this, joining the protest is not morally required although we respect the decisions made by our fellow bloggers to withdraw their blogs from his stats completely. The situation for MandM is slightly more complex as we run the Top 10 NZ Christian Blog rankings. For us to join the boycott we would have to not only withdraw our stats from Tumeke Blogosphere’s rankings but also cease using them.

The MandM top 10 score is obtained by averaging Tumeke Blogosphere’s stats with HalfDone’s. On HalfDone’s stats MandM is ranked number 1 Christian blog, on Tumeke’s stats we are usually ranked around number 3 as different formulae are used to obtain each. If we drop Tumeke’s stats from our formula then we are left with only HalfDone’s which automatically hands us the number 1 spot on our own rankings; we are concerned that joining the boycott will look like a bit of an ‘own goal’.

On the other hand, prior to the boycott, not every Christian blog that HalfDone ranked featured on Tumeke Blogosphere’s stats and now a couple of the Christian blogs that did have joined the boycott so they too will no longer feature on Tumeke’s stats. This means that I now have too many blogs that do not feature on Tumeke’s stats to make my formula fair. The obvious solution is that I either stop using Tumeke’s stats (might as well join the boycott) or I develop my own formula or I stop doing the stats.

So until these things become clearer or further evidence or argument is presented, we will remain with the status quo and will not be joining the boycott. Feel free to help us work through the issues in the comments.

The top 10 New Zealand blogs on public discourse are shown below, the other 250 or so that made the rankings are over here.

We have climbed 1 spot from last month and are now only 1 point away from number 5, watch out Not PC. We are still holding the number 1 Christian blog position.

Tomorrow marks 6 months since we switched to our own domain so we finally have the full 6 months worth of Technorati authority, meaning that from now on, when our Technorati score is compared to another blog’s, it is a fair comparison.

As always, thank you for your blogroll links, backlinks, comments and visits!

[1] If you appear to pay attention to how your blog ranks, its readership and other stats; then
[2] You are blogging with the wrong motives.

I will leave it to our readers to work out which route we have taken.

Not only are we the 7th most read public discourse blog in New Zealand but we’ve also achieved something else… check out those crosses.

Top 10 Christian Blog report for HalfDone will be out soon.

November of course the was frenzied election month so naturally blogs with a strong political bent, delivering what the punters want, did well and others saw their traffic drop off. Many bloggers hung up their keyboards shortly into the month as their sole reason for existing was complete at the close of the election, new blogs were birthed, some of which debuted very high. As such, it was always going to be interesting to see how the stats came out.

MandM, of course, are not affiliated with any political party but we do have a classical liberal/libertarian leaning. Our political blog entries were naturally geared in that direction so when parties and candidates that fit our political viewpoint deviated from it we said so and those blog posts, particularly, were very widely read.

John Key on Religion and Public Life, although written in September, had massive readership through November, peaking in the week after the election as many people came to it on search terms such as John Key Religion or John Key Homosexuality.

Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1, also saw high traffic with Matt’s critique of ACT’s inconsistent liberal application of the harm principle when it came to feticide.

Of course entries critiquing the left were also popular, most read was Fisking Grant Robertson; Matt unpacked the propaganda put out by his old student union comrade, turned professional politician, against National’s Wellington Central candidate.

Finally our political framework or voting lens posts for Christians, such as A Voting Guide, Voting, the Role of the State…, What About the Poor? Sustenance Rights Examined also brought in high traffic given the confusion prevalent amongst Christians as to what their faith actually teaches them about the role of the state.

It appears we did enough in November as we climbed 4 spots to rank 46th in the country.

The numbers are fairly close through the top 40′s and 30′s we think if we work hard we should be able to crack 30-something in the New Year. We know December has been a bit stop and start for us but you all know why and it is Christmas.

Thanks everyone for your support, your visits, your comments and your links.

There is a lot of support in the blogosphere for this formula as anyone can post a bunch of silly and worthless posts and comment on their own blog or fail to delete the spam posts to drive the stats up for Tumeke’s formula but its a lot harder to self-manipulate the Alexa and Technorati stats; the best way to drive them up is to post quality content.

We had never linked to Half Done’s stats before because Scrubone had been using our old blogspot URL which in October had us sitting at 85, compared to 50 on Tumeke, but after bringing this to Scrubone’s attention last month he has run the stats with our correct data and we are absolutely ecstatic to see we are sitting at 31. Tumeke’s November stats will not be out until around the 20th (usually) so we will not know how that score fares with his formula until then.

My only criticism of Scrubone’s stats, and it is mean to call it a criticism given the amount of work that goes into stat gathering, is that there are no blog descriptions making it difficult for me to run a check for the top 10 Christians blogs off his stats without visiting all 199 and reading each in depth to gauge for myself. However, I can and will compile a shadow report as to how the top 10 fare on Scrubone’s stats compared to Tumeke’s so stop by later today. [I have an appt right now so check around mid morning]

Unfortunately whilst Tim did update our URL to http://www.mandm.org.nz/ he failed to do so for our Alexa and Technorati Stats and went off our old and defunct blogspot url that we left behind nearly two months ago.

To see the difference, compare both these stat-lines:

nz 18,531 * 4,732,054 (old blogspot url stats)

nz 1,694 * 1,783,797 (current mandm.org.nz stats)

As you can see in the last two months we have climbed significantly; 3 months ago that Alexa traffic rank stat (the second, bigger number) started with a 7 and our NZ traffic stat (which measures our popularity within the international community) is equally strong.

So thankyou everyone for your support. Your visits, your comments, your links have all helped us to achieve this result (of course we appreciate your contribution because of the contribution to the dialogue it makes first and foremost).

If you are still linking to our old blogspot url, the one with all the mandmandmandmandm’s in it, please, please, please update it