Oh dear. I had just regained my usual cheerful equilibrium when I looked at the shortlists for the Lib Dem Blog of the Year awards again.
And I saw that Mark Reckons has not been shortlisted for the main award.
I find this inexplicable. In my book he was one of the two favourites to win it.
Rather than rant about cliques, let me be try to be constructive.
Writing your blog posts in the style of essays or newspapers comment articles is a perfectly valid method. There are some excellent examples of blogs using this approach on the shortlists. But it is not the only way of blogging and should not be the only way that the Blog of the Year judges reward and thus encourage.
Those judges should make more effort to reflect the variety of blogging approaches that flourish in the party. Mark's recent interviews are an excellent example of what I am talking about.
2 comments:
Thank you very much for your kind words about my blog Jonathan. I really appreciate it and I am glad you have enjoyed my interviews - I certainly intend to do more of them.
However, I have been shortlisted in 3 out of the 6 categories and given how just a few months ago most people had not really even heard of me that is amazing to me and more than I could have really imagined!
Also, in my opinion the five bloggers who have been shortlisted in the LD BOTY category are all excellent and fully deserve their places.
I am really looking forward to the award ceremony and it will be great to meet everyone.
I have meant to do a post about this myself but have been mad busy with a software release in the last couple of days and then the #SciDebate thing tonight.
Jonathan. It may help to know that the shortlisting operates like this (or it did this year, anyway). One person (in this case Helen) puts together the nominations in all categories, and sends the list round to the judges.
We all then *individually* voted for our top five in each category. Helen added up all the votes and reduced each category to five shortlistees. I still don't know how the others voted and there's no reason why I ever would. We didn't have a collective decision making process where we decided to reject "non-essay-writing bloggers", or decided that Mark shouldn't be on the BOTY list. We just voted privately for what we thought was best, so there will have been as many lines of reasoning as judges.
(As it happens, my line of reasoning was informed by you. You said after last year that it wasn't very helpful for me to have won in three categories, it didn't spread the love very well. I thought you were right, so I put a different person at the top of each category, and Mark was one of the tops. Can't say fairer than that.)
Not that it makes the slightest difference, but I would have pegged Mark as someone who does do what I would broadly consider essay-style blogging, so I suspect this is a prejudice you are projecting onto others rather than one that is actually there. It's certainly not something I particularly had in mind as a criterion when doing my voting.
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