As usual, when MSM journalists notice blogs they get all the details wrong. He refers to St. Blog’s parish and then says that New York University’s The Revealer site provides the definitive list of Catholic blogs and is keeper of St. Blog’s Parish. Um sorry folks, but St. Blog’s parish far pre-dates the Revealer and there are much better and more comprehensive lists of St. Blog’s members, including Catholic Blogs Directory which lists 731 blogs.
The reporter then makes some weird remark about whether the blogs constitute worship. Does anyone seriously think they do? Very strange.
He also wonders that some Catholic blogs get more than 1,000 visitors daily, which while “not a great number” is “not bad for unadvertised personal cyberpages by Catholics with points of view that they cannot or will not keep to themselves.” Sounds like he’d rather we did keep them to ourselves. In any case, his numbers are way off. Amy Welborn gets something like 8,000 visitors daily (an estimate based on some Web-based metrics.) I know I get about 3,000 daily. Some Catholic bloggers are among the top-visited blogs online, not in the top ten, but in the top 150. Not bad when there are something like several million blogs online.
Whever I read it, I always have a slight aversion to the name “St. Blog’s Parish”. It seems vaguely lame and trivial given that it’s a relatively valuable resource. Ditto the fact that the aggregator is on a site called ‘funkydung’.
I don’t object to a creative name and certainly wouldn’t want it to be something generic (“CatholicResourcesOnTheWeb.com”), but there must be some happy medium. I guess my objection would be that “St. Blog’s” lacks what I think is a specifically Catholic thing: augustness combined with humility.
Anybody with me? Or am I just being stuffy.
I wonder how many people read his column? Pretty funny for a newspaper with a declining readership to talk about numbers especially conscidering that there are several St. Blog bloggers getting much more than 1,000 hits a day.
I contend that he had a deadline and no subjecty so he just went with and idea without doing any real research. Concidering the fact that all he mentioned about my blog was it’s tag line I think that clinches it. And of course missing Mark, Amy, Dawn, Kathy, you, Jimmy, and The Anchoress was just ignorant.