I’m not qualified

The annual Unitarian Universalist blog awards process has begun again. I do not plan to nominate or vote. There are something like 200 Unitarian Universalist blogs, but I can only seem to keep up with two or three them on a regular basis. So I don’t feel qualified to say which is the year’s best blog, or which is the year’s best blog entry.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t read lots of Unitarian Universalist blogs. But I like to read blogs written from other religious perspectives, like the blog entries aggregated at The Daily Scribe, with authors who write from Jewish, pagan, progressive Christian, Emergent Christian, humanist, and Buddhist perspectives. That kind of thing broadens my mind, and my mind could use some broadening.

And I am just as likely to read non-religious blogs: my two sisters’ blogs (Jean, Abby); the Horn Books Magazine blog Read Roger; and maybe Boing Boing and Bad Astronomy. Then there are the many newspapers, magazines, books, and the reading matter I get from Carol. Sitting on the dining room table waiting for me right now are: The Small-Mart Revolution (from Carol), The Shorebird Guide, rattapallax 13, Asimov’s science fiction magazine, The Post-Corporate World (also from Carol), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a book on religions of the African diaspora, and Harvard Business Review.

Not that I’ll get around to reading everything on that list. But I never wanted to be a specialist, and I can only do so much specialized reading. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said, “Those who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.” Not that I’d count myself wise, but I’m certainly not qualified to judge Unitarian Universalist blogs.

Update: An attempt at defining a set of criteria for what constitutes a “good religious blog” here.

15 thoughts on “I’m not qualified

  1. Philocrites

    By your criteria, Dan, no one’s qualified! I think of the “competition” as a way of drawing people’s attention to writers and writings that deserve a larger audience, not as some sort of comprehensive assessment. Perhaps someday someone will come up with a way to aggregate only the best or most interesting UU blog writing in one place, but that hasn’t happened yet, so there’s a certain willy-nillyness to the conversation.

  2. UUpdater

    Dan, your logic seems a good reason not to nominate, but not a bad reason not to vote. Particularly for the single entry nominations. You would only need to read a handful of entries to vote. Like Philo said it’s a way to find stuff you might find interesting.

    Of course, finding a way to aggregate the only the best or most interesting has a fundamental flaw in that it assumes everyone would find the same things interesting. This assumption would only be valid for people with like interests, and only the overlapping interests they all share. Maybe with more bloggers tagging there is hope that some day a filter would be created to get all UU blogs with a UU tag. Level of interest may vary.

  3. ms. m

    Your series on “faith development” is brilliant and in need of attention. ‘Nuf said. Oh, and any time you mention me is “award winning.”

    he he

  4. Pingback: arbitrarymarks.com » Blog Archive » UU Blog Award Overload

  5. h sofia

    I’d be more than a little worried about a person who did read all or most of the UU blogs out there. Who on earth would have time for that!?

  6. Administrator

    Philocrites — Ezra Pound famously said, Don’t trust any literary awards, not even the Nobel Prize. The real test of a blog, or of any piece of writing, is whether it finds good readers. Rather than an awards process, I’d prefer to see bloggers engaging in critical reflection on other blogs. (Now that I’ve said that, I suppose I’ll have to do just that.)

    Bill — I fully agree. That one sentence would make a good criterion for writing critical reviews/reflections on UU blogs.

    UUpdater — Voting processes for these kinds of awards tend to be very flawed. For example… My recollection is that a few hundred people actually voted in last year’s awards — yet my blog alone gets over 2,000 readers a month, and my readership isn’t nearly as big as lots of other UU blogs — so we’re not getting a representative sample, not by any stretch of the imagination. And it’s also pretty clear that blogs that promote the blog awards are over-represented in the results (note that I purposefully did not include an easy link from this post so my readers could quickly nominate this blog).

    ms. m — Hey, weren’t we going to write a book together about “faith development”? Oh, and speaking of award-winning: Ms. M. is just so totally cool and awesome, if you get a chance you should definitely take one of her classes (and for once, I’m not even being ironic).

    h sofia — How very true….

    At least Colleen backs me up when she says, “He’s got a point….”

  7. Philocrites

    Dan, maybe we could just all publicize our annual, monthly, and average daily readership and conclude that we had run a purely quantitative assessment of impact. (By this logic, however, UU World would be a much more influential magazine than The Weekly Standard, which seems to have helped land us in a disaster in Iraq, so perhaps circulation doesn’t really equal influence.)

    As a purist, obviously you can opt out of popularity contests, but your interest in evangelism if nothing else ought to make you interested in activities (like the blog awards) that generate community and buzz.

  8. Administrator

    Philocrites — Actually, my interest in “evangelism” (in a post-modern ironic sense) has led me to work with the strengths of the Web and social networking. I don’t believe blog awards make best use of those strengths. Most blog awards strike me as insider’s games — like the Hugo awards for science fiction, which are voted on by a small group of science fiction fans who happen to attend the world science fiction convention, and which are pretty much ignored outside of that small group.

    Rather than spend time on blog awards, I’d like to see Unitarian Universalist bloggers spend their time increasing their ranking in search engines, creating viral content that spreads beyond the narrow confines of the UU blogosphere, and working with new trends in social networking — especially working with the Semantic Web including RDF, FOAF, and OWL (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web to find out about these exciting new possibilities).

    I’m now thinking the Semantic Web should be a major priority for anyone who’s serious about using the Web — in particular, our early participation in OWL could be very powerful.

  9. UUpdater

    Even I, the fellow who maintains UUpdates, can’t make the claim that I read it all. Sure the voting is flawed, as are most voting systems, but that doesn’t mean that the award process has not introduced me to worthwhile content I would have otherwise missed. Yourself, PeaceBang, and others have managed to get nominations without self promotion. So I don’t think the process is entirely broken. Unless you wish to assert your content is entirely without merit.

    I did do a breakdown of the votes from last year, stripping out people that voted “straight single blog tickets”. Perhaps others would have been interested in those results as well. Perhaps you would hold those votes in higher regard to validity. If you decide you can not make an informed decision that is a legitimate choice. Your blog having a few thousand readers does not seem relevant in judging it against other material your readers have not read. The few people who felt they knew enough to vote in a majority of the categories probably represent the people who do read a fair amount of the UU Blogoshere content. In that sense I would say it is a fairly representative sample for the few who do have the time to keep up with “most of it”. the downside of publishing such data would be people wanting to game the system by self promoting and asking people not to vote single blog tickets which could be easily discounted. then it would be even less legitimate voting because a random factor would creep in as people randomly chose in categories they weren’t familiar with. I’m rambling, I’ll stop. i do think the nominations are the key. Even the people who self promote have someone picking “the best’ of the content to nominate, so there is some human factor ni deciding “what’s best”.

    In essence what you are saying is “I’ve got other ways to spend my time.” Fair enough. Speaking of ways to spend your time I took a look at the Church 2.0 Wiki and made some suggestions. Are you planning on maintaining that or is it a waste of my time?

  10. ck

    I dunno, Bill, the UUs I read talk about religion — ChaliceChick, Peacebang, Philocrites, Dan Harper :) And I try to talk about it, though my perspective doesn’t always explicitly talk about UUism. I think that’s part of what makes UU blogs different.

  11. Administrator

    Philocrites — I’m still learning about the Semantic Web — as I learn more, I’ll post something. Or better yet, someone out there who really knows could tell us about it.

    UUpdater — First of all, my sense is that you do the best possible job of administering a blog awards process — you deserve thanks for taking on a thankless task, and you don’t deserve having to respond to criticism from people like me. So let me publicly say, Thank you. And I am trying to spur bloggers to do some public critical reflection on the blogging medium — no one person is qualified to vote intelligently on blog awards, but there are lots of people who could write intelligent and thoughtful reviews of other blogs.

    I am planning to maintain the Church 2.0 wiki, at least through June, 2007 (at that time I’ll assess whether there’s enough interest to maintain it). Use 3d1t0r as the password to edit (I had to use password protection to prevent wikispam).

  12. UUpdater

    I appreciate the thanks, and constructive criticism for process improvement is always welcome. And I mean that for any web project I work on. Stonetreeuu.org, The awards, UUpdates, etc. I am sure there is lots more the community could do to move us in positive directions.

    I have, already, edited the Wiki. The details of what I fixed are in the sandbox. There are more items that I think need fixing, but the editor password does not allow it. If you have any questions regarding it feel free to let me know.

Comments are closed.