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Thursday, 16 October 2008

MandM go Private

Two years on from our very first post, In Remembrance of the Religious Right, the MandM blog has come to a place where it is officially grown up enough to warrant its own domain name.

Our readership has grown considerably since we started. We now feature on the top 100 New Zealand blogs - we moved up 8 places last time and I expect us to improve on that in the next lot of stats due out soon.

Despite the claims in this comment:


"this blog is in the top 100 most read New Zealand blogs and ranks as the the
most read (non-Catholic) and best Christian blog in the country"
It is not correct that we are the most read (non-Catholic) Christian blog in New Zealand as The Briefing Room deserves that honour, however, we have been increasingly climbing the alexa stats; we are up 279% in our global reach in the past 3 months.

[Since moving to our own domain Alexa is counting our stats seperately so the real figure is a combination of mandmandmandm.blogspot.com stats and mandm.org.nz stats - I am not sure how long it will take to truly transition to the new domain only.]

We are increasingly gaining speaking engagements and being contacted by journalists for comment purely from this blog.

We actually get stopped occaisionally by strangers who hear our names and say "do you write for the MandM blog?"

In the past year the average numbers of comments per blog post has steadily climbed as more people interact with our points of view which we love - keep commenting!

The number and range of blogs that link to us steadily grows. Please consider linking to us, you don't have to agree with us to link, one blog which links to us under the heading Philosophy (we are the only Christian blog under this heading) has this caveat:
"I don't like what they have to say but I might be prepared to defend some of
the sentiments they express"
Finally, despite two years of blogging neither of us have managed to memorise our blogspot url. When people ask what's the address of your blog? We have to reply, go to google and type in MandM Flannagan - which has worn kinda thin.

Anyway, our new url is: http://www.mandm.org.nz/

Old links will continue to work as we will run a permanent re-direction from our old blogspot address.

13 comments:

  1. There are a few other christian blogs that get read - Steve Taylor at Emergent Kiwi gets about 140 uniques a day according to his site meter - which is slightly less than Ive averaged this month so far...
    http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz/

    ReplyDelete
  2. That site meter does not make it clear that it is measuring uniques though. In any event, the official NZ Blog rankings are not just measured on uniques, the formula used is:
    TRAFFIC (Average daily unique visits)
    + INCOMING LINKS (Technorati "Authority")
    + POSTS (Average posts per week, viz: Total posts for month ÷ number of days in month x 7.)
    + COMMENTS (Average highest commented post per week, viz:
    Total four posts with the most comments for the month ÷ 4. )
    = RANKING SCORE

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is your site classified as a Christian site Dave?

    ReplyDelete
  4. as a christian, i find this whole ranking system thing a bit problematic - there is something in the gospels about reversals and the need to take great care in the value systems by which we value ourselves.

    i'd be fascinated to know how you deal with such tensions and the insidious pressure to go up in blog rankings.

    steve
    www.emergentkiwi.org.nz

    ReplyDelete
  5. I tell you how I deal wiith it

    I just dont care. I just blog.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Steve our blog is not about the pursuit of rankings or popularity. The post was about sharing our pleasure at discovering that our blend of non-dumbed-down philosophical theology, apologetics, ethics, social commentary, humour and observations on life not only has a market within the New Zealand (and international) blogosphere but seems to be surpassing the more populist Christian blogs.

    Given the anti-intellectualism prevalent amongst evangelicalism, the constant "yes you have a PhD but will you go over people's heads, what's your ministerial experience" that I have encountered in the church made me wonder if anyone would read my blog because I deliberately and regularly post articles I am working on for publication within academia and yet these are frequently our most read and linked to blog entries on other Christian and secular blogs.

    Finally Madeleine and I are very pleased that our refusal to dumb down our Christianity and to present a reasoned faith has been so widely embraced and respected by not just Christians but by sceptics and atheists alike - in fact we have been able to enter dialogue and form relationships and enter discussion with hardened anti-christian sceptics that were open to such discussions previously purely from running this blog.

    The rankings are a nice measure of the relevance of this brand of Christianity.

    As far as the tension you referred to goes, I don't feel any; I don't write to try to be popular - many of our posts are highly controversial, there are no post-modern attempts to apologise for the difficulties that he faith raises for those who are at odds with it here.

    I am intrigued by your suggestion that Christians engage in reversals of the world's standards, you wouldn't give the top student in your class a D and the bottom student an A would you?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I love this blog because it proves that Christiantiy can cut it and you guys cut it so well.

    Sometimes what you write is over my head but that just makes me want to work harder to grow my own knowlege.

    I can't stand how the church molly-coddles us from big words and complex concepts, it should be trying to get us to step up rather than stepping down.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I have more than once had to check my premises on reading the content of this blog.

    Definately raises the bar for philosophical blogs and sets them for Christian ones.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Linky updated. And thanks for yours!

    steve, I am not certain that wanting exposure is bad. I would like more exposure, but only because I think some people would be interested in what I write. However I do not expect people who find me boring or irrelevant to come back. With the number of people online chances are there are a few hundred people who are interested in a blog on any given narrow or broad topic, they just don't know it exists.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I'm with Dave, I don't care, I just blog.

    That said, it is kinda nice knowing that your work is appreciated and really as I said in the post the primary motivation for purchasing and configuring (did I say that too lightly? - it has been and continues to be a total pain and has completely stuffed our Alexa stats) was motivated mostly from being frustrated at answering the question "whats the URL for your blog?"

    Simply put, it had to be something we could remember!

    ReplyDelete
  11. I've had my blog (and now podcast) for a while, but I've only just recently (within the last week or so) started to take an steps to obtain a higher blog ranking - are ANY blog ranking for that matter. I just blog because I like it and I think that every now and then I have something to say. But trying to get high exposure does strike me as an obviously smart thing to do.

    Steve, surely you don't think it's prideful to maximise the number of people who will hear your message, right?

    ReplyDelete
  12. Is your site classified as a Christian site Dave?
    Well, I have a Christian computer, and only drink milk from Christian cows. I even have Christian name - and it is on my blog.

    But I do allow swear words in comments.

    Does that assist?

    ReplyDelete
  13. ta matt and madeline for the clarification, appreciated your engagement,

    glenn - my comment was not a comment on pride

    matt - re student marks - i continue to ponder the relationship between marks and formation, i don't think they're the same.

    steve
    www.emergentkiwi.org.nz

    ReplyDelete

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