Off the top of my google:
- The Bernies (Australian Blog Awards), run by vlado. (2006 awards about to be voted-upon.)
- The Weblog Awards
- The Bloggies
- Deutsche Welle's Best of the Blogs ("The BOBs")
- The Webby Awards
- The (extremely and justifiably controversial) SmartyBlog Awards.
If we're going to have awards, wouldn't it be nice if the blogosphere, left and right, political and non-political, could unite behind one set? It's silly and confusing to have multiple "BESTEST BLOG IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD FOR 2006"ses.
It won't happen of course (the biggest bloggers will almost always play the "too cool" card and decline any interest, and their lack of participation will rob each of these blog awards of any credibility), but wouldn't it be handy to have some idea which awards to take seriously and which to mock unmercifully (*cough* Smartyblog *cough*)?
SO, I present:
THE 2006 ANNUAL WEBLOG AWARD AWARDERS AWARDS.
Which blog awards did you most enjoy reading this year? Which were the funniest? The most thought-provoking? The ones with the grooviest formatting? Sexiest vote-tallying procedures?
(If more than five people vote I'll probably become incontinent with surprise. Hey! Incentive!)
Now, before you vote - some things to note about blog awards.
Firstly, bloggers like and respect the awards they win, and contemptuously dismiss the ones they don't. Awards traditionally dominated by one side of the political spectrum or the other tend to be boycotted by the other. A US award whose Australian category is always won by Tim Blair will be given little credence by the left of the blogosphere; and an Australian award whose voters are seen to be predominantly left-wing will result in that same blogger publicly "declining" his nomination.
Other bloggers just like to highlight their "cool" status by playing nonchalant silly-buggers. Once they've won an award, their need for reassurance satisfied, they'll start a campaign to try, for example, to get an eminently mockable blog elected "Blog of the Year" (in the process exposing that blogger to greater ridicule).
Then there's the issue of how can blog awards be properly democratic anyway? Enterprising script-kiddies have been known to try to take over the voting. At most you could limit votes to one per ISP, or verifiable email address, but those restrictions in themselves would skew results.
So, do we give up on the idea of blog awards altogether?
Well, there are awards for most other forms of media, on the basis that they reward the admirable and encourage people to excel. Blogs are a legitimate source of news, commentary, personal writing, photography, comedy and so on. And what other measure of whether a blog is doing things right or not is there? Number of comments? Google AdSense revenue?
Awards also point readers in the direction of new and worthwhile blogs they may not previously have realised were out there.
But then we're back to the problem of who should run these things so they have some credibility. Most media awards are run by professional organisations, and judged by the participants' peers. There are prizes for the winners, funded by those professional organisations.
Obviously that can't happen with blogs. There's no professional blog association - bloggers are just anyone with a computer and
SO. Let's resolve this question once and for all.* Come vote for your favourite awards! Vote here - and then vote there! Vote until you're drunk with all the democracy! And then vote some more!
Backslapping for EVERYBODY!
*Ha.
UPDATE: Freakishly enough, Problogger.net has also just started its own Blog Awards Awards. So clearly we're going to need a Blog Award Awards Awards to determine which of these Blog Award Awards to believe. Unfortunately, if I start one, I'll be competing with a commenter at Problogger, who's already proposed the same thing.
Then we'd need a Blog Award Awards Awards Awards.
My brain hurts.
