Dan J. Brennan

Blogging Like Jogging, for Jesus

Mark Roberts (ht: Michael Kruse) posted Blogging Like Jogging, Part 1 and Blogging Like Jogging, Part 2.  It's a good metaphor and he adds more insight into blogging.

Roberts writes:

A couple of years ago everybody was predicting that blogging would take over the media world. Bloggers had toppled Dan Rather. Soon they would replace the New York Times and CBS Evening News.

Now it’s chic to proclaim the death of blogging. Critics, often from the mainstream media, celebrate the fact that millions of bloggers have quit. “The end of blogging is near,” pronounce the pundits, with undisguised glee.

The initial “blogging is the world” bandwagon was silly and naïve. The new “blogging is dead” repeats the silliness and naïveté in the opposite direction.

Blogging isn’t the world. And blogging isn’t dead, either. Rather, blogging is like jogging.

If you’re as old as I am, you might remember the jogging rage. Near as I can remember, it came in the late 60s and early 70s. Everybody bought jogging shoes and little nylon shorts, and then set out to get healthy and lose weight through jogging. Many wanna-be joggers had visions of their svelte bodies winning marathons, even as the waddled along in their Adidas Viennas."

Something to Think About: Blogging by Faith or Fame?

Ted Olsen opines on the The Death of Blogs earlier this week. 

Even though there are 3 million blogs starting every month, blogging apparently has reached its peak, according to Olsen.  He cites a report indicating over 200 million bloggers have given up on blogging. 

Bloggers face two challenges according to conventional blog wisdom: quality and frequency.  That's not just secular blog wisdom, it's Christian blog wisdom.  I wouldn't be able to find the link right now without doing some serious searching but one of the top Christian bloggers, Scot McKnight has said one has to blog more than a couple of times a week to sustain a following.  However, more and more bloggers are beginning to experience blog burnout.  The combination of frequency and quality forms a high bar for "success" for sustaining interest, or creating even bigger interest.   

Do the math.

Olsen quotes Michael Parsons: "You can't expect readers to show up unless you show up. And the Internet never closes. … Every successful blogger I've come across is the same. Eat, sleep, and drink the work. No time out; no holidays."

Do the math again.  Look at some blogrolls. 

"But there never seems to be enough time
to do the things you want to do,
once you find them."  Jim Croce

Located somewhere in the quality and frequency mix is the desire for quantity.  Bloggers soon find out quantity is a temptation and a worthy goal, simultaneously.  One of the criteria for measuring the "success" of a blog is the well-known numbers criteria--even among Christian bloggers.  Vying for interest is a good thing and can be a bad thing, again, simultaneously

It's no surprise that same mentality pastors and church planters face about numbers translates into the criteria of "successful" blogs.  Mak points this out in a church planting context:

"I have done it and I have had it done to me (how's that for passive voice? take THAT Mrs. Herder hehe) - the question "so how many people do you have?" or "how are you growing?" or any number of variations."

Do we blog for faith or fame?   Am I positing a false dichotomy?

Perhaps we need a dose of how God is working through "ordinary" blogs like Ruth Tucker's analysis of spirituality in megachurches versus smaller churches in Left Behind in a Megachurch World.

"Ordinary" blogs means, in this immediate context, blogs not written by recognizable gifted writers, creative writers (those who can perform the latest tech wonders on their blog) or those who have gifts to lead the "mega-blog," or for those who simply have "ordinary" numbers for readers.

Although there are bloggers who do focus on information, I'm not so sure if even those bloggers are blogging merely for the sharing of information.

I suspect most Christian bloggers, if not all of them, blog by faith.