Interestingly enough, the majority of the top 10 Christian blogs are straight talking, soundly reasoned, conservatives who don't water down their faith and who robustly defend it.

The fact that such blogs figure in the top 150 most read blogs in New Zealand is admirable especially when you consider that most of them enjoy respect from non-Christian blogs. Even anti-Christian blogs link to most of the top 10.

One cannot say the same for those trendy, lefty, post-modern, hand-wringing, wet, re-contextualised evangelical blogs. Seems like their offerings are as ineffective outside the church as they are inside it.

I just want to say that I really love this website and I love this blog and I love New Zealand! I love meeting new people and love chatting on blogs and so I have made my own blog, its for people for Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. It is called 'Experience - New Zealand' and is my first blog, it is unlike this blog but is also a lot of fun - checkout: (http://www.experience-dating.com/free-online-dating/free-online-dating/new-zealand.html)

thanks for the analysis and the link

I'm in the middle of starting a new business so a bit busy to blog as regularly as I target but hope to at least get a few pre election posts our relating to the election

Dave Crampton also self identifies as a christian who blogs, eg see comment toward the end of http://big-news.blogspot.com/2008/10/christian-vote-andy-moore-has-new.html

Madeleine, I encourage you to repeat this analysis each month

http://www.gavinknight.com/2008/10/6-in-top-10-nz-christian-newspolitical.html

PS, Tumeke! ranks NZ news/political blogs only so your listing is therefore only of NZ news/political blogs only too

I think we all have patches like that Gavin! I am officially not here right now as I have exams. That said...

There are a lot of blogs in Tumeke's list that are not political/news related (and there are a lot of blogs that are political/news related that are not on his list).

I wasn't trying to do an in depth analysis, I simply ran a search over Tumeke's stats for words like: Christian, Christianity, Theology and pulled out the first 10.

Further, as I said, I made a distinction between Christians who blog (I am aware Dave is a Christian) and Christian blogs that identify themselves as Christian blogs. I only ranked the latter and I utilised Tumeke's classifications rather than exploring each and every blog on the list to see if I could find mention of God somewhere in it.

fair call

altho I suspect this will give a 'right' bias to your list as in my experience those of us on the 'right' are more likely to explicitly self identify as christian

I'm not quite sure why that is as my 'left' friends are as passionately christian as I am when I talk with them!

as an aside ...

i have seen tim selwen explicitly state his list is only for ranking nz news/politics blogs so some must have slipped thru

eg he won't rank che tibby (http://objectdart.wordpress.com/) because he doesn't have enough news or politics content (deliberatley as che is a public servant and so constrained in what he can write)

Just goes to show that our left wing Christian friends are in error on two counts.

;-)

Hi, I'm sure my blog's meagre traffic (about 10 per day) will not qualify me:
http://ropata.wordpress.com/

but I'm pretty sure the following are significant:

http://fritchie.wordpress.com/
http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz/
http://www.beingfrank.co.nz/
http://halfdone.wordpress.com/

Hi Ropata - it is always worth emailing your details to Tim Selwyn and checking. Simply being on the list makes people more aware of you and you might find your visitors increase.

The other blogs you mention should also submit themselves to the list - not sure if all would be classified as public discourse - Tim looks for news and politics to feature fairly heavily to make the cut, but some would definately would fit in I would expect.

Thanks for the plug Ropata, but to be honest, I can't be bothered worrying about being on the list. When I was on blogger I was easily in the top 100 and made my stats public because I actually cared where I rank.

I don't put as much effort into my personal blog anymore ( www.fritchie.wordpress.com ) and don't really care where it sits in any rankings... I would imagine it won't rank since the stats aren't public. I like it like that.

The blog I am putting the effort into now is www.hcweb.org and that is due to see some major changes over the next few months as I will be having a job change.

Sometime in the first half of next year I will be taking up a job at TEAR Fund, so The Humanitarian Chronicle will effectively become a TEAR Fund blog that I will oversee... it will be interesting to see what happens with its place in the rankings once that is fully implemented and it has been operating as such for a while :)

By the way MandM, I've been reading here for a while now and thoroughly enjoy the discourse. Thanks for your efforts.

Anyone interested in Economics from Christian perspective should look at Blessed Economist that comes out of Christchurch.