The Australian Blog Awards (ABA) is on again. This is organised every year at this time by Vlado and the actual process of nomination and voting is hosted by Collective Apathy. You can go to Collective Apathy now, register, and nominate blogs in the many different categories; a bit later on there will be an opportunity to vote (using the optional preferential system, and by casting one vote per person in each category) and the category winners are announced on Australia Day.
Based on experiences from the last two years I have very mixed feelings about the idea of the ABA. It is terrific to do something that recognises the diversity and quality of the best productions of the blogosphere, and I really like that these are democratically based and that they are run by a volunteer. On the other hand, most people seem to vote for their friends and allies, which is only natural (although it’s not much fun to have to choose between two friends who are nominated in the same category), but it does raise the question of whether the awards are really for popularity, which doesn’t seem to me a specially meritorious achievement. On the other other hand, our culture places a little too much emphasis on the bestowing of awards at the expense of other ways of recognising excellence.
I also think that last year’s field was verging on being cliquey. Contests are like that anyway, and blogs are also like that anyway, so it’s a minefield. In 2006 there was some talk that people did not know about the existence of the awards until it was too late to nominate. Most of the nominations came from basically the same network or circle of blogs, and although they happened to be excellent blogs, I’m pretty certain there are whole other alternate universes of Australian blogs out there which were equally worthy of exposure and praise but simply didn’t feature in the nominations. Historically the Australian blogosphere may once have had a major cluster around certain veteran blogs, but that is not the case at all any more. Speaking as one of last year’s eventual winners it did take some of the shine off to acknowledge that the field was perhaps not truly representative or truly competitive.
In short: I think the ABA is potentially a good project but it could misfire if not enough people from a wide range of blog networks join in. As it’s happening I think the best thing to do is to try to make sure it’s very widely publicised now, at the nomination stage. Its credibility and success (and usefulness as an introduction to the diversity of the blogosphere) depends so much on it being very widely publicised and on lots of people taking part. If you agree then go over to Collective Apathy now and nominate some blogs, and if you have a blog yourself, consider giving the awards a plug there.
The
universeblogosphere gazing upon itself?Vlado also insists on having a hideously complex registration process, which is designed to flout rorts, multiple votes, etc. Only it doesn’t - it tended to be the cliquey sorts who nominated and registered last year, and got the votes in the end.
It’s not hard at all timT, you just go there and register - simple two-step registration process same as what they have instituted at Catallaxy.
I already said that the trend last year was towards cliqueyness and that’s why I suggest people get in now and nominate as broad a range of blogs as possible & publicise the event on their own sites. I also suspect there will be less unhelpful angst directed toward Vlado if more people participate, as it won’t seem so personal then.
One of the problems regarding the noms (channelling Gretel) might be that launching them at this time of year means a lot fewer than usual people paying attention.
Anyway, here’s a permalink to the noms thread:
http://www.collectiveapathy.com/bernies_07_nominations
Why are the awards called “the Bernies”?
I tried to register at Catallaxy (I am absolutely tumescent with commentary). Allegedly, I’d get a secret password sent to my email. But none has arrived. This reeks of self-selecting claquery. I think the Yobbo system is best as it promotes quick, uninhibited retorts. It makes for quick, sharp, fun, spontaneous blogging. As my uncle Marshy used to say, the medium is the message and the massage.
“tumescent with commentary”
best blog comment 2006 right there
Hey Jet, before you hit the switch to paranoia, did you check your spam and trash folders?
They did let me register after all ..
Jet, if you can’t get it to work try emailing catallaxy AT yahoo DOT com and they will register you manually.
What? Go down on the bended knee to Helen asking for a handjob?
(Paranoia comes with the territory for us Cold War pilots grounded from TV reruns.)
Jet, we’ve got a whole section on the front page headed ‘registration and advertising’. Basically Jason & c8to got jack of akismet dumping commenters in the spam bin, so we’ve gone for registration, which fixes the problem. If you clicked on that link, it’d tell you that by emailing catallaxy AT yahoo DOT com we’ll make sure to add you to our commenters’ database manually.
Apologies for that, but we were getting sick of the spam.
I press the “delete spam” button once a day and it works for me. I agree that having to register to comment is a needless pain in the ass.
By the way these blog awards are a joke. Anyone right of LP has boycotted them since the infamous Darp/Lefty/MsFits circle-jerk two years ago that Laura alludes to but won’t mention.
I mean if Tim Blair sent his readers to vote he’d win every single category, but he’s got too much class for that, unlike the people who stuffed it up to begin with.
Wow. If only I’d known democracy was as simple a matter as ordering your droogs to vote for you, I would have got to be Head Prefect.
Vote [1] Pavlov’s Cat for the Droog Party.
For Bloshy Tolchoks in the Yarbles, Milk-Plus with Vellocet, and Lashings And Lashings of Ultra-Violence.
Well, exactly. Especially the bit about the yarbles.
Well, Catallaxy’s broken with the righty convention and put ourselves up in a couple of categories, and the lovely Darlene has put us up somewhere else…
Mind you, instructing libertarians to go vote for us will be a process rather akin to herding cats
*Sigh* I wish I had droogs.
I’ll be your droog, Tim. As long as you play Ludwig Van VERY LOUD.
That sounds like some sort of very weird come-on. Which it WASN’T. No offence to you, Tim.
None taken, I assure you. I didn’t even notice it sounded like a weird come on until you pointed it out, but now, well, yeah, it does a bit. I’ve heard weirder though.
PC: These are supposed to be an award for quality, not a ratings counter.
Otherwise why not just subpoena the stats for every Australian blog and rank them 1-10?
All you need to do is look at the 2005 winner and the votes/preferences rundown and you’ll see why it’s a joke. All the lefty blogs preferenced each other and locked it in. All the non-aligned or right-wing blogs just voted for their favourite (probably because Tim Blair was the only non-lefty nominated.)
This was entirely due to a How To Vote campaign run by Fits, Darp, Ausculture and writers on this blog.
And then in 2006 all the left got the shits when every single right-wing blog in Australia declined nomination in the awards. Because it’s no fun to win if you’re only beating fellow travellers, but any chance to get one over the right is great, no matter how unfairly it’s done.
It’s a joke and it will be a joke again this year.
And so the annual blog awards whinge-a-thon begins…
see, this is why I am trying to get people to participate. Especially those large and fresh swathes of the blogoshpere who have no idea who Darp / Fits / Lefty are. There’s no reason why people who’ve taken up blogging in the last six months should have their fun wrecked by old shite from two years ago.
‘blogoshpere’ = ‘blogosphere’. Not drunk.
Just what is a Darp, anyway?
Ah the days of Fits/Lefty/Darp. Remember Pandagate? I do, I still have the bloody tshirt. I agree with Laura, the blogosphere is a much larger place than it was back then, so there’s no point in holding old grudges or dredging up lefty-conspiracy paranoia. Go forth and vote people.
Yes, damn fine t-shirt!
But what Laura said - it’d be great if there were a wider net cast both in terms of nominations and votes.
Wouldn’t be truly Australian awards without a massive outbreak of whinging, bitching and backstabbing…..
Oh FFS Jet Jackson, I don’t even know who you are, much less your politics. Our registration system is broken - even our old faithful JC couldn’t get in without emailing me. Stop being bloody paranoid. No one is promoting ‘cliquery’. If you want a password if I know who you are on the registry list I can send you one.
Well, I am planning on reshuffling my front page, reconfiguring my boundaries and doling out squillions of dollars in hand-outs – I understand this is a sure fire way to win election-type thingies.
Second tier options include, disenfranchising the voting base of my opponents and challenging any final decisions in a court stacked with my cronies.
Man, I am a cert!
With this plan I think I can simultaneously win best ACT blog, best Vic blog and best overseas blog.
Um… because it is not litigation?
Yeah, I’m in two minds over the awards as well. I nominated some bloggers that I know aren’t particularly widely read, but despite how brilliant I think they are, it does seem to be a rather superfluous gesture. Cursory glances at most links lists will reveal the same names over and over. I’m not taking anything away from any of these blogs - clearly they’re popular for a reason. But I do think there’s something to be said about the phrase ‘popularity for popularity’s sake’. Most blogs, even if they were light years better, wouldn’t stand a chance against some of the more ‘famous’ sites out there.
People could always do what nexus6 has done and give out their own awards with reasons:
http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2006/12/2006-inaugural-nexus-6-weblog-awards.html
You could probably make the same sort of complaints about the Oscars, the ARIAs, the Walkeleys and the rest. Tim Blair did pretty well in the Best Australian Blog category in the recent 2006 Weblog Awards (self-styled “world’s largest blog competition”), although it was a strange bunch of finalists I must say.
I can’t see how you can design something like this that could really satisfy everybody - especially a group as electic as blog readers and writers. Either you have a popularity contest, as most of them are, and you get stuck with people voting for their friends, stacking the vote or just getting all their readers to vote for them - all of which is fine really, even if it may seem a trifle gauche to some, given it is about popularity - or you have a panel of people doing a ‘best quality’ type of judgement, and then you just get peope whinging about the biases of the judges.
Ken at Troppo is doing a version of the latter soon, where he will select what he (and maybe a few other people) reckon were the best quality essay type post on Australian blogs through the year. I imagine whatever they pick will leave some people dissatisfied. Having disagreements about ‘best of’ awards is part of the interest of them.
If these things had big prizemoney or somesuch attached, there’d be reason to whinge, but I just see them as ways to celebrate blogging and give people a chance to look at some different sites. A bit of bragging rights is always nice, but in something as diverse and differentiated as the blogosphere, an award won’t count for much either way. An award may make someone visit a site once, but if they think the site is crap (or just not their cup of tea), they’ll still think it, regardless of what any award says.
I guess the alternative to voting is some sort of expert panel, but that’s more problematic IMHO - and it’s also produced odd results in the past.
If people want to cast the net wider, the best way to go, surely, is to publicise the thing on their own blogs and encourage others to do so also.
As Zoe has also done at crazybrave, from a somewhat different perspective on the blogosphere, if not the universe.
Agreed, Dr Cat.
Also what TimT said on Zoe’s thread:
I speak as someone who has written several posts on depilation, and remains somewhat obsessed by it