For most people in most situations, anarchy is nothing more than a misguided ideal or nightmare. But I am here to tell you that it has been achieved on earth–in the form of you, the bloggers, readers, commenters of the biblioblogging community.
First, there is no officially imposed standard of who is a part of the biblioblogging community. There’s hundreds of blogs, loosely semi-organized under the community-driven unformation maintained first by the pseudonymous NT Wright and now by Jeremy. Anyone is allowed to say anything, the only limitations being the ownership control that each blogger has over his little homestead of internet turf.
There are no rules at all imposed, only the rules of a community which chooses to relationally lock, to varying degrees, the offensive, senseless, or insane.
There are disagreements, and the parties involved deal with their differences privately or publicly, as they see fit, and spectators are free to form their own judgments. No official group makes rulings.
I’ve been watching and participating in this delicious back-and-forth biblical wild west of ideas for some time now, a place where everyone from Protestants, to Jews, to Catholics, to Atheists and others bring what they have to the market of ideas for the evaluation of others.
It’s like the book of Judges, really. Every man does what is good in his own eyes.
Surprisingly, everything is functional. There is no lack of ideas being published, and peer review pushes the noteworthy to the top and discards the rest. Unofficially. It’s a beautiful shining model of efficiency.
Here’s hoping we don’t start itching for a king.
10 Comments
Uh, Mitchell, you already have a king of biblioblogging….
Nah, we don’t have a king. If I had to give you a title, you’d be a Prophet or Judge or noisy guy–a famous and respected one, no doubt, but no king . . .
When you start drafting our sons into your army and adding our daughters to your harem, then you’ll be a king.
Wait a minute. They killed the prophets. Are you giving me a hint?
Or perhaps we should go with “Judge” or “noisy person” then. I would hate to see you cyberassassinated. Anyway, this is slightly off topic, but since I’ve got you here, do you know if there’s any way I can make wordpress automatically approve some people’s comments without sending them to moderation? For, say, you and Jeff Oien and Joel Hoffman, I see no reason to keep you comments off my site until I look over them, as long as you solemnly swear not to blaspheme too much.
Go to your discussion tab on your dashboard. Also, if you are on a server where you can , you might want to think about changing your permalink structure, unless this is your preferred method.
All right. I did it. And permalink structure is now changed. You like it?
Looks good. Changing the permalink helps with search engines for some reason. Since you have a great blog, Mitchell, more people need to see it.
Thank you for the advice and kind words. I imagine that search engines weigh the contect of the URL’s when deciding what words to associate with pages, and that therefore numbers and p’s and ?’s are less helpful than actual titles.
That is the rumor:) Another tip, if you promise just to keep this between us… if you ping yourself, don’t. Google doesn’t like that for some reason. Link to yourself without creating a ping or trackback.
Nope. I don’t ping myself, unless it happens by accident. I’ll look into that though. And I’ll make sure not to mention that tip to anyone. I’ll just leave it here between us on this public conversation board.