Top Blogs - Criteria

As I said yesterday, over the next few weeks I will be blogging about what I believe are the “top blogs.” Admittedly, my approach will be far more subjective than the evaluation I showed yesterday from ChurchRelevance. When it comes to the blogosphere, much of what we like or dislike is determined by our interest, preferences, and in many cases, the relationship we have to the author(s) or their content.

Nonetheless, I do have a few criteria, here they are:

1. Content - The blog has to have a theological, ministry, or spiritual formation nature to it, and mainly from a conservative evangelical perspective. All these are loose terms, but I think they give you a clear picture of my fuzzy parameters.
2. Informative – Does it have something fresh for us, it does not have to be serious all the time, but will we learn by reading this blog?
3. Current - It must be updated regularly; as a general rule, at least once a week. The only thing worse than a blog that is dormant, is one with sporadic updates. These are automatically eliminated from my consideration.
4. Interesting - It must be regularly interesting (this is totally subjective). By interesting I mean that it consistently presents topics that are worth reading about, and even entertaining at times. Not all subjects will be of interest to me, or to you, but the effort should be there.
5. Creative - I like creativity; blogs with meaningful variety and creativity (and humor is a double bonus) are far more interesting to all of us. Nothing bores me more than constantly reading the same things over and over, but just in different words. Of course I have an easy solution to that, I don’t.
6. Relevant – This piggy-back’s with the previous two, if it is interesting and creative, it will probably be “relevant” to me. Does it regularly have it? Or, not so much?
7. Appeal – And last, being a product of the visual culture that I am, I have to ask, “is it attractive?” Does it have a smooth layout? Is it easy to navigate? Does it look inviting? Etc. You would think this would be the easiest, but I’ll show you a few that drive me crazy.

For the various blogs some of these categories will be more useful than others. Nonetheless, I felt I needed to establish some criteria other than my guts feelings, so in thinking about it, these are the things—at least at the present time—that I feel are important to me.

For each category I will rate it by a three star system:

*** Excellent, always good stuff.
** Pretty Good, most of the time.
* Not so much!

I will start with what I feel are my top tier choices, and move from there. So here we go . . .

The first one on my list: Between Two Worlds. Stay tuned.

Blessings
3 John 8
Bill H.