Atheists: Get Out of the Damned Closet!

This is supplementary material for a blog I posted encouraging Athiests to come "out of the closet."

My first "random" survey found these results. The data were obtained by googling for "atheist blog", going through the results in Google's order, then applying these rules:

• Reject aggregates and blogrolls. Group blogs allowed if it's a small number with a fixed membership.
• Must be active in the last two weeks
• Must be a blog site (not news)
• Must be by an atheist (not merely about atheism)
• Mark author as "n/a" (not available, i.e. anonymous) if I can't find the author's name within five minutes of entering the site.

The table above indicates that roughly six out of the twenty or so bloggers were willing to give their names. Note that there are more bloggers than rows in this table, because a couple of the sites were group blogs.

I wasn't happy with these results – the Google results were too sparse and didn't seem to be finding the "mainstream" atheism bloggers. For my next survey, I decided to sample the "contributors" list over at Planet Atheism, the one in the right-hand column. I took a "random" sample by using every 12^th link, and then rejecting any that didn't meet the rules above (except that I didn't reject inactive ones this time).