The 2005 Bloggies

The Fifth Annual Weblog Awards: The 2005 Bloggies were announced yesterday.

Categories include best blogs by countries and regions, most humourous, best writing, etc., but there is no category encompassing faith blogs, Christian blogs, god blogs, or anything along that line.

Blog Readers

A new CNN/Gallup poll suggests that the large majority of people do not read blogs. The poll found that only 7% of the population read blogs two or three times per week. 48% said they never read them. The good news was that only 26% were "very familiar" or "somewhat familiar" with blogs -- so not many people have been exposed to them yet. CNN said the poll was based on telephone interviews of 1,008 American adults carried out February 25-27 and that it has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3 percentage points.

Source: Bloggers Blog.

I am not surprised at these findings. Although blogging is becoming increasingly more popular, I think that there is still a long way to go before blogging is completely "mainstream." What do you think?

Who is He?

There seems to be a lot of buzz about Hugh Hewitt these days.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show heard in more than 70 cities nationwide, and a Professor of Law at Chapman University Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Law... the New York Times best selling author of If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat. He has written (5) other books. Hewitt has received 3 Emmys during his decade of work as co-host of the PBS Los Angeles affiliate KCET's nightly news and public affairs show Life & Times. He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Standard, the online edition of The Weekly Standard. (Source)

He has his own blog at hughhewitt.com, and also wrote Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World.

In his book, In, But Not Of: A Guide to Christian Ambition, Hewitt suggested the following:

#32 Start and maintain your own Web log (blog).

Hugh Hewitt Inspired Blogs "is dedicated to documenting the blogs that were inspired by Hewitt's advice and to encouraging the community of bloggers that develops."

The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers

The National Study of Youth & Religion has just published its first major findings after three years of study, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, by Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, published by Oxford University Press.

The National Study of Youth and Religion, is funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. and is under the direction of Dr. Christian Smith, Professor of Sociology, based at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They list their purpose as this:

"to research the shape and influence of religion and spirituality in the lives of American adolescents; to identify effective practices in the religious, moral, and social formation of the lives of youth; to describe the extent and perceived effectiveness of the programs and opportunities that religious communities are offering to their youth; and to foster an informed national discussion about the influence of religion in youth's lives, in order to encourage sustained reflection about and rethinking of our cultural and institutional practices with regard to youth and religion." (Source)