Kent Shaffer is the founder of ChurchRelevance.com, an online resource created to inspire and train ministers to be more relevant and effective, and a volunteer strategist for lifechurch.tv. He recently published his updated list of the “Top 200 “church blogs.” His list intrigues me for several reasons, beginning with his methodology, which he describes as follows:
- Several hundred blogs are reviewed in a preliminary screening to determine if their statistics are competitive enough to be ranked.
- 245 blogs are selected to be ranked.
- Data is collected for each blog from all 5 measured criteria (i.e., Alexa Rank, Compete Visitors, Google PageRank, Google Reader Subscribers, and Yahoo Inlinks).
- For each of the 5 measured criteria, each blog is ranked in comparison to all other blogs being evaluated.
- A composite rank for each blog is determined by averaging each blogs ranking from the 5 measured criteria.
- The top 200 blogs are published.
So What?
The methodology from steps 2 to 6 is sound, but step 1 is suspect for several reasons including:
- Several hundred is a very vague number
- No indication given regarding how the “several hundred” were chosen
I hope that Shaffer’s methodology is far more sound that it appears, but must assume it isn’t unless he posts additional information that addresses these concerns. As is his list certainly contains popular Christian blogs, but offers no assurance they are truly the two hundred most popular (unless you understand most popular is not of all blogs but rather of a pre-selected grouping of “several hundred”). For those wanting to look a bit deeper into how to be a more discerning reader of statistical data related to your faith journey I recommend Bradley Wright’s recent book, Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites . . . and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media (2010), which made my list of the Top 10 Christian books published in 2010 (my list is taken from a very limited sample size: all books I read on or before December 31, 2010 with a publication date of 2010).
- Regarding his list, Shaffer states, “I have compiled a list of the world’s top church blogs.” What is your response to this description given his methodology? (especially in comparison to calling the list “Ken’ts Top 200” or “A Top 200”)
- How often do you simply accept a statistic at face value without asking any critical questions about what the number means or how the researcher arrived at it? Are you more likely to look more closely at material if it is online versus in print?