Category: Business

Jeff Jarvis has awarded me the prestigious Jeffie Award for being the Most Curmudgeonly Blogger. I consider this a slight, because I deserve the Lifetime Achievement Award for Curmudgeonly Blogging, not just some little annual prize, so once again we have evidence that Jarvis, the people of New York, media hacks, and all people associated with award competitions are abject morons not fit to share this planet with me.

Where does this fool get off thinking he’s in a position to award prizes to me?

I’m very, very disappointed.

Michele, editor of a small victory, has withdrawn from the rigged and tainted Bloggie Awards:

There’s significant evidence that the voting is rigged. Judges themselves have stepped forward to say they got together with other judges to decide on who in their circle should win. One judge said that she didn’t bother to read the blogs she didn’t know and just voted for the ones she read regularly.

…

I am withdrawing my name from the ballots. They can give my place to someone else, or just leave it blank. I don’t care.

I’m totally impressed, and feel like she qualifies for the Lifetime Achievement Award in Integrity. If the others who were nominated who weren’t part of the circle jerk will kindly follow Michele’s lead, we can uncover the bad guys from who’s left.

The most glaring example of the unsavory nature of this competition can be seen by looking at the Lifetime Achievement Award. In the entire history of the blog, there have been exactly two people who qualify for this kind of recognition, Evan Williams (the Blogger guy) and Dave Winer, the longest running blogger, the original quality blogware producer, and the architect of the XML/RPC standard. Evan was awarded his sometime in the past, but Dave (whose contribution is actually greater than Evan’s) didn’t even make the finals, against such do-nothings as Rebecca Blood and Matt Haughey. Give me a break.

And any blog award that can’t find a nomination for Instapundit is ridiculous on its face.

I don’t say this because either of these guys is my buddy; I’ve never met them, and I trash both of them on a regular basis. But facts are facts.

Amish Tech Support isn’t pleased with this year’s Bloggies, and neither am I, so let’s Boycott the Bloggies:

So, what do I think? Well, first off, I think I should have just taken my nomination form, greased it with Vaseline, and shoved it up my ass for all the good it did. In a way, this looks like a grassroots groundswell reaction against the big folks: Vodka, InstaPundit, Steven Den Beste, James Lileks. Little Green Footballs managed a political, but if mainstream even brushed against you, kiss accolades goodbye.

Yup. Awards for blogs are silly in concept, but if somebody is going to hold himself out as running an awards competition, he really has to do a better job than the bloggie people do. Their categories are silly (“Best GLBT Blog”), their nominations don’t fit their categories (Fark is a political blog? News to me), and most of the blogs that are recognized leaders, like Lawrence says, are omitted.

I really wish that somebody with the time and energy to make a go of it would run a blog awards competition with a rational nomination process, and that the people who deserve to be considered for a genuine award competition would kindly boycott the Bloggies and go for this new award instead. Call it BlogStars, since the name Bloggie is already taken by these amateurs, and set up some categories that make sense, such as best political content, best news content, best regional blog, graphic design, style (not limited to graphics), humor, insight and analysis of current events, technology, arts and literature, movies, weirdest personal diary, Mondo Bizarro, Knee-Jerk Liberal, Legal content, Academic content, that sort of thing: categories that don’t cubbyhole a writer into one and only one area, and categories that people care about instead of Best Latin American blog.

In the meanwhile, I’m boycotting the Bloggies.

UPDATE: Brian the 646 Guy was one of the randomly-selected 50 nominators who whittled the nominees’ list down to the final 4 in each category, and he’s pissed too. Here’s the list of nominees they were given, and it’s short several blogs I know were nominated.

UPDATE: Anonoblogger Centrs explained how the contest was rigged by block voting, but now doesn’t want to be quoted and has deleted her post, as a good caring person should when they’ve said too much. Here are the salient portions, posted before centrs got the call:

“the main problem? it’s rigged. the numbers are grossly skewed. i like nikolai as a person and i know that his intentions are good, but there is just no objective, scientific way for ballots to be cast. this is not even nikolai’s fault. he’s a nice enough person to trust other people to be nice too. unfortunately, they just aren’t…

…i also know that the email padding and nomination committee conspiracy is absolutely true.

for those of you with great weblogs and awesome designs that thought you might be nominated, you didn’t have a chance. you really didn’t, so don’t take it personally…

…i think we need to clarify that nikolai asked people to help him and only a handful responded. of that handful, 75% are of a group that agreed together in advance on how they would vote, actual ballots be damned. they were proud of it, bragged about it and had a good laugh at the fact that they figured out how to beat the system. a system designed by a teenager who was just trying to have some fun. it is misleading to say you only voted once when that vote carried so much weight.”

Oddly, centrs pulled the post out of concern that it was linked by “homophobic” sites, but one of the chief complainers is a gay community webzine, East West, who noticed that one of the finalists for GLBT blog is, you guessed it, straight:

A special note on this category: One of the nominees is not like the others, Min Jung Kim, put forward by some ignorant and misguided Texans as well as herself is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, but that didn’t stop her, according to Nikolai, from pointing out a “loophole”, whatever that means, that allowed for her inclusion. By this very logic East West should be nominated for best Canadian because we eat maple syrup, love Canada, and have friends who live there. Wouldn’t that have been funny? No, not really.

You find your bigotry where you want, because East-West has some unkind things to say about Andrew Sullivan’s sexual orientation (“That Gay Jackass”, to be precise).

Meanwhile, I’ve received, from Mr. Nolan, a list of the e-mail addresses of the 50 who made the final picks, and was not surprised to see that a third were free accounts at Yahoo, Hotmail, and Netscape.

The ultimate issue here is that a group of people, [apparently from Dallas], decided to rig the contest, and the procedures set up by young Nickolai made it real easy for them to pull it off. You have to wonder about people willing to go to that much trouble to win a Wil Wheaton award.

ANOTHER UPDATE: centrs clarifies in the comments that she’s not an anonoblogger, identifies herself, and on her blog posts a detailed run-down on the cheating and the reactions to its disclosure.

She answers the question of why people would be willing to expend so much energy on this particularly lame award competition: they’re Texans. Living out there under that ferocious sun, cut off from civilization, and surrounded by ignorance, Texans are known to go loco from time to time. I know, I used to be one.

My advice to Texans who can read: get out while you still have a chance.

PeterPribik.2y.net is live again; Joe Bob says check it out.

Matt Welch has the 411 on his newspaper deal with Dick Riordan; it’s a weekly, not a daily as we’d previously thought. The cast of writers, and the ad fare, will be upscale from the coffee-house weeklies. Sounds like a noble venture, a likely success, and a welcome addition to the southland media scene.

The Corner on National Review Online has all the details on the cannibalism at STATS, the devils who fired Iain Murray for blogging.

I won’t be subscribing to the STATS newsletter for $25/yr, and I hope no one else does either.

The Media Matters show on PBS is a typically smarmy piece of not-for-profit condescension that can take any story and make it boring by a pedantic presentation. Their segment on blogs tonight was preceded by a piece of self-congratulatory self delusion on the premise that Op-Ed pages have changed Administration policy on Iraq, and another one on sensational photographs that was too odd to watch. The coverage of blogging was simply bizarre; they profiled four east-coast bloggers, Megan, InstaReynolds, Anil, and young master Willis, and I do mean profiled: they shot the segment in a Blade Runner-on-acid style that made the people look like cyborgs conjured up in a back room at the CIA lab where the AIDS virus was invented and the black helicopters come for maintenance.

This was apparently intended to make blogging off-putting and surreal to the traditionalists who still get the news from the papers and the McNeil News Hour. Despite the hammy presentation, Megan came off nearly as bright and articulate as she is on her blog, Reynolds showed symptoms of literacy, and Anil came across much better than he does on his blog. Willis looked and sounded like a sedentary teenager with a broadband connection and a deadbolt on his bedroom door, but he smiled and was very pleasant.

I don’t have high expectations of anything on PBS, and this show met them. They did spell the URLs correctly, and for that we should all be grateful, and now a whole new generation of people who watch PBS at 11:00 PM know that it was bloggers, and not James Carville and Sid Blumenthal, who put the Trent Lott story in the news. That’s PBS for you.

Oliver Willis has some intesting observations about blogger diversity, and Kim du Toit sets him straight.

UPDATE: I noticed that the jpegs on Oliver’s site are less ethnically diverse than the Frisco Blog Party, and mentioned as much in his comments; he then banned me from leaving further comments. Pot, Kettle, etc.

Who needs cat blogs when we’ve got Brat blogs?

Virginia Postrel should be blogging again any day now.