Blue Cord

Because I am anal about such things, I went into my blogroll today and added the XFN tag “met” for all of the bibliobloggers who attended the biblioblogger lunch at the SBL last month. So far I have yet to see XFN data used for anything useful, but I like tagging stuff. At least the data are there if I ever need to make use of them in the future.

As I sit here listening to carols with my Christmas tree set up and candles glowing all over the room, I thought I would draw my readers’ attention to the “Cavalcade of Bad Nativities” hosted at goingjesus.com. There is a new calvacade for 2007, but be sure to check out the collection from 2004 as well. As the tag line says, “It came upon a midnight weird . . .”

Hat tip: Chris Brady, who caught the virus from Jim West. I agree with them that the cat nativity is highly disturbing, but the s’mores Jesus is just wrong, wrong, wrong!

Today I came across a new tool for advertising my blog. Since other bloggers read this blog, I thought I would add a post about this in case anyone else wanted to use it on their blog.

The tool is called BlogRush. It is the widget that says “From the Blogosphere” at the bottom of the sidebar to the right. Here’s how it works.

I signed up for BlogRush and gave them the address for my RSS feeds.  They take that feed and show the title of my posts on the BlogRush widget on other people’s blogs, just as my blog is showing the title of posts from other people’s blogs. When I joined, I selected the category of religion and the subcategory of Christianity for my blog.  This means my blog is only advertised on other blogs in that category, and my widget only shows blogs from that category.

BlogRush is free, but it operates on a credit system.  For each time one of my pages containing the widget is loaded, I get one credit.  Each credit equals one time that one of my posts will be shown on someone else’s widget.  Credits can also be earned by getting others to join, because you get credits for each of the credits people under you earn (sort of like a pyramid scheme). You can also limit which of your posts uses your credits. For example, I have blocked this post from showing up on other people’s widget, since all of them will have already know about BlogRush.

If anyone wants to join, please click on the bottom of the widget to go to their site. They have a great video that gives you an overview of BlogRush.  And by you getting to their site by clicking on my widget, I get credit for you joining. Yes, its shameless self-promotion, but no sense writing a blog if you don’t have readers!

In my previous post I mentioned the biblical studies blog carnival that I hosted in May 2006. In order to procrastinate get a feel for how long biblical studies blogs lasted, I visited each of the links from that carnival to see how many were still going. Given the fact that so many blogs last only a few months, I figured that most of them would be defunct.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that of the eighteen blogs mentioned in that carnival, only two of them have completely disappeared. Two more are still going but have not had any posts in the last few months. The remaining fourteen are still active.¹ Several of the blogs are no longer at the address listed in the carnival. These have all moved to new hosting platforms.²

This is, admittedly, only a small sampling of biblioblogs. It would be interesting if Brandon Wason and Jim West could give us an idea of how often they have to remove a blog from their list at biblioblogs.com.

1. I define “active” to mean that they have had at least a few posts within the past month. [back]
2. The change is usually from Blogger to WordPress. [back]

Tyler Williams is scrambling to get the biblical studies carnival up and running for this month after someone else was unable to do it at the last minute. In the meantime, Doug Chaplin has pulled together a mini-carnival at Metacatholic to whet our appetites.

To get an idea of how the biblioblogosphere has grown in the past few years, you need only compare Doug Chaplin’s carnivalette with Biblical Studies Blog Carnival V from May 2006 (hosted here on Blue Cord). I included every link that was sent to me for the carnival, but my carnival was shorter than the mini-carnival Doug is hosting.