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The historical journal

GodIndex articles: the historical blog, revisited

Eleven surviving topics, revisited with sources. These articles examine what the early project published, what its interpretations assumed, and what a future study would need to test.

2008: countries, events and a new index

Archive / 2008 · 07

The July 2008 incident: when an index needs an audit trail

A reported attack on the early GodIndex raises a lasting question: how can readers tell an authentic shift in responses from a disruption to the system?

Archive / 2008 · 07

Britain and Germany: what a country rating cannot prove

A July 2008 headline turned different country scores into a provocative question about god. The surviving figures are interesting; the leap from a score to a national judgement is not justified.

Archive / 2008 · 07

When GodIndex and the US Index moved in opposite directions

A short July 2008 note links opposing index movements to new participation from Asia. It is an early clue that audience composition and weighting mattered to GodIndex.

Archive / 2008 · 07

Football, fortune and a country rating: the July 2008 story

The original post used football to explain a gap between the UK and German views. It is a compact example of how an attractive story can outrun the available evidence.

Archive / 2008 · 08

Georgia, August 2008: one event, different country curves

The Georgia-war commentary compared responses across countries. Its most useful legacy is the question of how a shared event can produce different patterns in a self-selecting audience.

Archive / 2008 · 09

When RateTheGod published its first performance report

The first report moved the project from a changing homepage display to a retrospective account. That change in format matters for understanding what survives today.

Archive / 2008 · 09

The financial crisis and GodIndex: reading the September note

The September 2008 article linked the financial crisis to falling ratings. It also became part of a later debate about whether the site’s own headlines could influence its results.

Archive / 2008 · 10

October 2008: the GodIndex low and the danger of a missing minus

The original October article reported a low near −1.8. A later archived homepage displayed a still lower value. Reading the dates and units correctly changes the story.

2009: reports, continuity and the chart’s next move

Archive / 2009 · 01

The second report announcement: what was planned in January 2009

A surviving announcement names four events for a planned follow-up report. It is evidence of an editorial plan, not proof that the full report was published.

Archive / 2009 · 05

The 2009 call for help: sustaining a public internet experiment

In May 2009 the original site invited people with useful skills to get involved. That small announcement reveals an important part of the project’s history: the work needed to keep it running.

Archive / 2009 · 07

July 2009: revisiting the GodIndex “bottleneck”

The final recovered blog post used technical-analysis language to describe GodIndex. Its charts survive, but a visually persuasive pattern is not the same thing as a tested forecast.

Browse the original months

2008 · 07 · 2008 · 08 · 2008 · 09 · 2008 · 10 · 2009 · 01 · 2009 · 05 · 2009 · 07

Dates in the archive identify the historical source or surviving mirror. The new editorial text was published in September 2026. See our editorial standards.

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