Christians on Blogroll

Remembering that all survey respondents identified themselves as Christians, this is how they answered the question "What percent of blogs on your blogroll are written by Christians?"

Percent Christians on Your Blogroll..........Number of Respondents (out of a total of 115)
None........................................................2
10%.........................................................4
25%.........................................................6
30%.........................................................2
40%.........................................................3
50%.........................................................7
65%.........................................................5
75%.........................................................9
85%.........................................................2
90-99%..................................................21
100%.....................................................48
No Answer or "No Idea"..........................5

What this means: 41% of all Christian bloggers surveyed linked exclusively to other Christians.

If you add the 21 bloggers who claimed their blogroll had less than 10% blogs written by non-Christians, then 60% of those surveyed barely link, if at all, to blogs of non-Christians.

Overall, 69% of those surveyed stated that between 90-100% of the bloggers on their blogrolls were Christians. As many respondents commented that they only blogroll weblogs they would want to recommend to others, the lack of blogrolling non-Christians implies a wariness and caution to promote the weblogs of any non-Christians through permanent linking.

Some respondents stated that they are always surprised to find non-Christians linking to their weblogs, and a few survey respondents even answered that they had asked non-Christians to remove a link to them in the past because they did not want to be associated with the linking website or it's content.

Bloggers Interaction

Do you interact with other bloggers in ways besides blogging?
(Blogging would include reading and commenting)

Way of interacting..................Number of Respondents
None..............................................15
Email..............................................81
Instant Messenger........................46
Telephone......................................21
Regular Mail ("Snail Mail")..............15
In Person.......................................23

31 of the 115 respondents had also met people in the flesh whom they had originally come to know through weblogging.

What these statistics mean:

With 87% of participants interacting with webloggers in ways other than simply reading and commenting on blogs, the statistics tells us that webloggers are highly communicative and interactive people. They do not just maintain their weblogging relationships through the medium of weblogging, but instead branch out to other communication modes. They are willing to go beyond the given medium when developing and maintaining relationships they first found through weblogging.

Reading Habits

How many blogs do you read on a regular (daily) basis?

Number of Blogs read..........Number of Respondents
1-5.......................................13
6-10.....................................34
11-15...................................16
16-20...................................14
21-25.....................................6
26-30.....................................5
36-40.....................................7
46-50.....................................4
65-70.....................................3
100........................................1
No Answer...........................12

What Blogging Tool or Service Do You Use?


b2: 3 respondents, or 2%
Blog Studio: 1 respondent, or <1%
Blog-City: 1 respondent, or <1%
Blogger: 54 respondents, or 47%
Blogger Pro: 1 respondent, or <1%
Handcode the html by hand: 4 respondents, or 3%
iBlog: 1 respondent, or <1%
LiveJournal: 1 respondent, or <1%
Movable Type: 33 respondents, or 29%
Own PHP Creation: 1 respondents, or <1%
Pivot: 1 respondent, or <1%
Pmachine: 2 respondents, or >1%
Radio Userland: 1 respondent, or <1%
Typepad: 5 respondents, or 4%
WordPress: 4 respondents, or 3%

Population Survey Statistics

The following are population statistics from those who participated in my online websurvey of Christian webloggers, as originally discussed here.

To gain survey participants, I posted a request on my blog, and I also emailed ten "big name" Christian webloggers (including some whose weblogs receive up to 1000 visitors per day and having anywhere from 100-350 other weblogs linking to them, according to www.technorati.com). Eventually, over 30 weblogs linked to my original survey post.


Total number of valid responses:
115
(valid responses included both Parts One and Two completed).

Gender:
Male: 54%
Female: 45%
Undisclosed: < 1%

Age of Respondents:

11-15 years old: 2
16-20: 7
21-25: 29
26-30: 23
31-35: 14
36-40: 14
41-45: 9
46-50: 6
51-55: 3
56-60: 5
Undisclosed: 2

The average age of respondents was 34 years old. The youngest respondent was 11 years old, the oldest was 60 years old.

Geographical Location:

United States: 80 respondents
Canada: 13
Australia: 7
United Kingdom: 5
New Zealand: 2
Malaysia: 2
Bosnia: 1
Brazil: 1
Nicaragua: 1
Philippines: 1
South Korea: 1
Ukraine: 1

Professions:

Middle School/High School Students: 5
College Students: 13
Graduate Students (Seminary): 3
Ph. D. Level Student: 1
Teachers (Elementary, Middle School, and High School): 6
College/University Instructors/Professors: 4
Pastors: 6
Missionaries: 5
Youth Pastors: 4
Web or Computer Technologies: 18
Housemaker/Housewife/Stay-at-home Dad: 13
Other Professions: 11
Writer/Journalist/Reporter/Editor: 8
Engineering: 3
Arts Related Fields: 3
Company Director: 2
Retail Management: 2
Disabled: 2
Unemployed: 2

* Some respondents listed more than one profession, therefore numbers will not add up to 115.

Denominational Affiliation or Church Currently Attending:

Alliance: 1
Anglican: 3
Assembly of God: 1
Baptist: 10
Baptist (Fellowship): 1
Baptist (Reformed): 1
Baptist (Southern): 8
Baptist Union of Western Canada: 1
Bible Church: 1
Brethren: 1
Christian Reformed: 5
Church of Christ: 1
Church of God: 1
Church of the Nazarene: 3
Church Plant: 1
Congregationalist: 1
Conservative Congregational Christian Conference: 1
Eastern Orthodox: 1
Emergence-type church: 1
Episcopal: 5
Evangelical Covenant: 1
Evangelical Free Church: 1
Evangelical Friend ("Quaker"): 1
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: 2
Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada: 1
Evangelical Presbyterian: 2
Evangelical Protestant: 3
Home Church: 2
Indigenous Nicaraguan Evangelical Church: 1
Interdenominational :2
Methodist (Free): 2
Methodist (United): 1
Non-Denominational: 10
None: 2
Not Identified: 8
Orthodox Church: 1
Orthodox Presbyterian: 1
Pentecostal: 2
Presbyterian: 4
Presbyterian (liberal): 1
Presbyterian (Orthodox): 1
Presbyterian Church in America: 7
Roman Catholic: 4
Catholic: 3
Seventh Day Adventist: 1
Vineyard: 3

Posted

There's a thread over at the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding Forums about Kids and their Websites. I posted some thoughts here.

Blogging and Privacy

Fernanda Viegas, a a PhD candidate working in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, just posted the results of the surveys he did for a class called Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier: Electronic Surveillance and Copyright Control.

His survey was on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability in blogging. The background on his survey can be found here, and the results can be found here

Link via Benediction Blogs On.

Generation Blog

In the mid to late 1990s, Christian thinkers started putting forth the idea that internet ministry was a viable option and should be embraced by the church as a whole in order to stay culturally relevant, and to avoid being passed by on the information highway. The idea of Christianity using technology to advance the Gospel was not a new one (think of radio and television programs, for example). Internet evangelism simply stems out of other ways of evangelism. (see Jeff Zaleski’s The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology is Changing Our Spiritual Lives, San Francisco, CA: HarperEdge, 1997, p. 103).

With Generation X, "it's all about relationships," (see Ralph Moore's Friends: The Key to Reaching Generation X. Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2001, back cover) and incarnational ministry is also important. If we want to reach the young adults and adolescents of today, connecting with them through relational and incarnational ministry is key. Youth today want to see genuineness. Everyone wants to see genuiness.

With weblogs fostering communication and community, it would seem that they would be an ideal place on the internet to do ministry. Relational and incarnational ministry, it seems, have the potential to flourish via weblogging.

But, are Christians grabbing hold of the potential of ministry through weblogs? How are weblogging Christians online fostering relationships? Are they simply developing relationships with other Christians and perhaps alienating the non-Christians? Are they creating a distinct Christian weblogging community and alienating themselves from the rest of the online blogosphere? With all the adolescents who are blogging online, is anyone seeing the potential for youth ministry?

Are weblogging Christians, in essence, creating a weblogging "bubble," a closed Christian circle that includes only others of "like mind"? When you take a look at the weblogging community of an individual Christian weblogger via their sidebar and the other blogs they link to, it seems that often include mostly other Christian weblogs. Are Christian webloggers tending to communicate solely with other Christian webloggers?

Does the average Christian weblog invite non-Christians in? While Christian fellowship is happening amongst the Christians, what about the seeker? How is the world of Christian weblogging ministering to him, and how can it be improved? How can we encourage Christian webloggers to reach out to non-Christians in the blogosphere? How can we foster and facilitate relationships between non-Christians and Christians?

The Beginning

This project is one that has been somewhat on the go for me since sometime in Summer 2002. That semester I did an independent study called Adolescent Sub-Culture Profile, which was the last of the requirements for my Bachelor of Arts in Youth Ministry degree.

For my Adolescent Sub-Culture profile, I decided to do something new, something that little (or no) research had been done on yet. I chose to study adolescents steeped in the somewhat new sub-culture of online journalling/weblogging/blogging. I was going to be a new kind of Patricia Hersch.

My independent study lasted the span of the semester (September to December), and during it I spent a lot of time seeking out and reading the blogs of adolescents online. Late in September I started my own blog which I called Mikao's World.

Mikao's World became the platform from which I reached out into the world of blogging adolescents. It didn't take long to realize that to have the right to be delving into a sub-culture, it's quite beneficial to be in and part of that sub-culture. Mikao's World gave me a basis and a platform from which to explore their world.

People love the interactive nature of blogging. It breeds and facilitates communication. Commenting back and forth. Tagboards. Emailing. Instant-messaging. I've done all of them with people I've "met" through blogging.

I've been able to develop relationships with people I would have never met any other way. I have friends with whom I talk to regularly via our blogs and emails and IM.

The number of bloggers is expanding. Adolescents and 20-somethings love this new fad. Is it just a fad? I don't know. Maybe. But while it's here, I think it has a tremendous potential for relational and incarnational ministry.

Getting online is easy. Starting a blog is easy. Maintaining it takes discipline and dedication. I am assuming however, and I know I'm correct, that most of the people, if not all, who are reading this, already have their own blog.

Developing relationships takes time. And discipline. And dedication.

This new project, of which this blog is a part of, stems from my early project. I want to encourage dialog on this topic of relational and incarnational ministry online via blogging.

I welcome your thoughts.