Larvatus Prodeo

LP won in three categories in the 2006 Australian Blog Awards - Best Political Blog, Best Collaborative Blog and Best Queensland Blog. The awards are the only ones that aren’t commercially sponsored or based in the US, and are entirely reliant on the nominations and votes of Australian blog readers.

LP is archived by the National Library of Australia as a site of cultural significance.

LP has been named by Crikey as joint winner of their 2006 Blog of the Year award. From the citation:

What a difference a year makes. In 2005 the blog landscape read like the fledgling medium it was – providing interesting reading that wasn’t so consistent. This year it was just a matter of cherry picking from a selection of blogs that are daily must-reads. Two very different blogs offer a snapshot of the lightning fast rate at which blogs have developed in 2006: Larvatus Prodeo* is brought to you by a group of people who produce one of the most thoughtful, measured and insightful political blogs in the country. At the other end of the spectrum, Tim Blair continues to stir the pot. He pi-ses people off, makes observations that others miss and publishes what others won’t (he gave the finger to the major newspapers by publishing 12 of the controversial Muhammad cartoons). The better blogs are increasingly setting the agenda and changing the pace of news, and old media is scrambling to get a slice by signing bloggers up and folding them into their existing websites (Tim Blair and Tim Dunlop of Road to Surfdom have both been signed by News Limited recently). Blogs have well and truly hit the mainstream, and these guys are the cream of the crop.

LP’s founder, Mark Bahnisch, has been invited to speak at a number of conferences on blogging, politics and new media, including The National Young Writers’ Festival, New Realities: Beyond Broadcasting for management and staff of the ABC in October 2006 and the Australian Blogging Conference in March 2007 organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation and QUT. He also spoke on a panel on politics and new media at the 2006 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival.

Mark has also been interviewed on the sociology of blogging in print and on radio, and contributed a chapter in 2006 on political blogging to the first internationally published academic book on blogs, The Uses of Blogs.