Sore Eyes

when did blogging become a bloodsport? yikes.

I think the worst part of all that bloc-voting mess was the fact they intentionally voted in a non-GLBT blog into the GLBT category just to see if they could impact the results. Unfortunately Think Dink has taken down her entire site now, but the exact quote was:

"We wanted to see if it could be skewed and IT CAN – look at Min Jung Kim on the Best GLBT finalists list..."

Ironically enough, counting the blog finalists from Texas (where this group originates from) yields extremely high results.

Yes, that's a particularly brazen example of what some of the judges got up to.

However, the nomination of sites in categories for which they are ineligible goes well beyond the GLBT category or (as far as we know) the whims of a group of friends among this year's judges. Is Fark really a weblog about politics? A Small Victory may be written by someone who expresses political views in a fairly robust manner, but for all that Michele posts lots of sarcastic comments on Robert Fisk or the French or Arafat and what have you there's no shortage of posts about Michele's kids or her pop culture favourites. Is Little Green Footballs about politics, or just home to a community which comments on news stories and tends to a particular way of looking at certain topics?

Are Googlism, the Friday Five and 100 Things... "a replicating idea that spread about weblogs?" Was 30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog an "article or essay about weblogs" or a highly informative and very well-written how-to on configuring your weblog templates? How is Boing Boing a "weblog completely about computers and/or technology" when there are posts about science fiction, television, music and wacky animal stories?

The wider issue that has plagued the Bloggies from the beginning is that nominations are allowed to stand in categories where they didn't fit. Whether this is because the categories need rejigging or because the judges were reluctant to reject the view of a site's nominators about which category a site should go into is a question that Nikolai needs to look into if he's going to do the Bloggies again in 2004.

Very valid points, John.

I don't consider my weblog a political blog in the sense that, say Daily Pundit is. I tend to throw a lot of other subjects in there besides politics, as you noted.

The big problem with the bloggies is the narrow categories. Nikolai means well, and he has really put a lot of effort into them, but if he wants to continue he needs to change both the voting process and the categories.

Actually, of the 50 judges only 23 judges vote so it's closer to 20% than 10%

Wow! I had no idea all this was going on. And here I was just bitter because I didn't get short-listed... Now I'm justified in thinking the whole system is flawed! :)

Michele:
I'd say that the major problem is that the voting problem isn't fixable: if voters choose to be dishonest then there's little Nikolai can do about it.

The categorisation problem is in principle easier to fix, though there's a danger that you'll end up writing a thousand-word rule defining what a "weblog" is (let alone a "political weblog" or a "topical weblog") and still leave enough room for disagreement to fuel all sorts of disagreements. I think all you can do is let the voters nominate sites for particular categories and then trust in the sense of the voters to weed out candidates that are clearly ineligible for a given category. And if you can't trust enough voters to do that then you have to ask whether there's really much point in having a vote at all.

Brian:
That's very interesting. I can understand that some judges might not feel able to cast a vote in all categories. Not everyone is competent to assess the worth of candidate for techie weblog, or of non-English language weblogs, or the neat programming which make someone's home-grown content management system particularly swish. That's just fine, as long as they abstain from judging those categories.

However, to have that many not voting at all brings the validity of the entire judging process into question. Perhaps it would have been better to extend the judging deadline by another week or so, or to ask some other volunteers to step in. (Or to not have judges colluding in support of their favourite sites, though that's not something Nikolai could easily prevent. Whether it would have been detectable after the event is another question.)

Kris:
"Flawed" is putting it mildly. What worries me is that the official Bloggies site still makes no reference whatsoever to all this, and that Michele's site is still available for voters to waste a vote on. It may be that Nikolai is thinking about how to respond to the shitstorm that's blown up about this, or that he's decided to ignore it. Or perhaps there was just as much dissension about the nominations last year and I just failed to notice...

I think the larger issue is what The Bloggies are actually for in the context what a blog is for. There are definitions all over the place, so I won't bore you, but I can't believe no one has thought to just give them to those whose sites get the most visitors based upon their site meters or whatever. Surely the really good sites are those which are visited the most? And if that isn't the case, wouldn't it be more logical if there was a central place were people could recommend a weblog they've just read which was really effective (a sort of Metafilter just for weblog entries), that way we could all be rewarded daily with each other's good writing...

I suppose the purpose of any weblogging award is twofold: to identify quality weblogging, and to bring the webloggers responsible to the attention of people who might be interested in reading them.

The thing is, if popularity equates to quality then that implies that sites which only get a few dozen visitors a day are rubbish, and speaking as the writer of one of those weblogs I must respectfully disagree! :-)

If the Bloggies were meant to measure the quantity of links a site gets then they might as well just ask for nominations then visit Blogdex or Google to determine who has most incoming links. Which would be very dull and predictable, and would ignore all sorts of webloggers who write interesting, amusing or informative posts but don't get (or want) lots of traffic.

IMHO, if you're looking to identify interesting sites, setting up a list of categories and inviting people to nominate weblogs for each category is a sensible way to go about it. The problem arises once you've got the nominations if you want to winnow the list down to half a dozen finalists per category.

I'd think that a clearing house for weblog posts would look very much like MetaFilter, but I think it'd be swamped with entries very quickly. (I dread to think just how many weblog posts a day there must be!)

Perhaps the real point is that weblogs themselves act as a pointer to good posts elsewhere, so once you've found a dozen or so weblogs that match up with your interests you'll be directed to a fair bit of material you wouldn't otherwise encounter. It'd be a very selective picture of what's being talked about in the Blogosphere, but if it's a choice between that and being swamped by thousands of posts at some centralised site then I can live with the partial picture.