First, Why do you include yourself and why are you welcomed? What do you feel makes you a biblioblogger? It is certainly more than just a feeling or a statement. If you blogged about sea urchins and not a lick about biblical studies, but called yourself a biblioblogger, I’m not sure you’d really be accepted as one (not that there’s anything wrong with blogging about sea urchins). So, what is it?

Secondly, I don’t care about policing. I have no interest in exclusion. There is no biblioblog police, but I imagine if someone didn’t really fit the expectations of what a biblioblog is (e.g., Steve’s Sea Urchin Heaven), then people simply wouldn’t read the blog. They wouldn’t have anything relevant for the carnival, certainly wouldn’t qualify to stand out as a biblioblogger of the month, and the folks at Biblioblog Top 50 could make their own decision based upon feedback that they receive.

Finally, about those who don’t wish to be included, I would want find people that could possibly fit our biblioblogging communal identity and start interacting with them. I would link to them and recommend them. If they don’t feel like engaging in this community and getting the extra traffic/dialogue, that’s their choice. But I don’t see anything wrong with offering it.

The thing is, these fuzzy parameters that I suggest are part of my motivations to find more blogs. I’m actually trying to broaden the category as far as it can go–trying to include more people.

It is also important that the community in question is welcoming and allows me to include myself. That can’t be accomplished with rules or definitions or guidelines, but only by a spirit of honest openness and conversation.

In any case, how would you police your defined community? And how would you include someone if they don’t choose to include themselves? In other words, how can parameters that exclude lead to inclusion?

But we also have these communally defining “events”: ranking of biblioblogs, carnival of biblioblogs, biblioblogger of the month. This goes beyond an organic process of natural interaction. In each of these monthly “events,” choices need to be made as far as what we call a “biblioblog” or who we call a “biblioblogger.”

Those choices need to meet a reasonable standard for what other “bibliobloggers” would agree constitutes their communal identity–more or less.

What happens in the “natural” process of blogging is that we often get pigeon-holed into our own mini-blogging worlds. These larger events help us to see other things of interest and help to drive traffic between our blogs–networking.

My interest is not to exclude (though that is a consequence), but to be intentional about including bloggers (particularly women) who have not as yet naturally flowed into our collection of mini-organic-blogging conversations.

Does that make sense?