Nominations are open for the Liberal Democrat Voice Awards

After last year's Liberal Democrat Conference I suggested that it was time to freshen up the Blog of the Year awards.

Yesterday Liberal Democrat Voice invited nominations for this year's awards and it seems they agree. The award for the Lib Dem blog post of the year has been restored and there is a new one for the best tweeter or Facebooker. Those are two changes I suggested last year.

But I am sorry to see the award for the best new Lib Dem blog has been dropped. I realise blogging is not the cutting-edge activity it once was, but there are still enough new blogs being launched to make it worthwhile. And encouraging new bloggers should be one of the purposes of these awards.

There are also five new awards, not related to blogging, on which all Lib Dem members can vote. That is a good idea and should help to raise the profile of the awards overall. It also suggests that the shortlists will be announced before the Lib Dem Conference next month - one of the problems last year was that everything seemed to happen at the last minute.

And, as a reflection of the decline of blogging (or the success of Lib Dem Voice's plans for world domination), the awards have been renamed. They are no longer the Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards but the Liberal Democrat Voice Awards.

Last year I suggested that the lack of direction to the awards' judges means they tend to favour blogs that are written like the comment articles in what we used to call broadsheet newspapers. I asked if that is the style of writing that blogging awards should be encouraging. It remains to be seen if anything has been done about that.

Still, this is a noble attempt to freshen up our party's blogging awards and I commend Lib Dem Voice for having the courage to make some radical changes to them.

You can find a full list of the awards and how to make nominations on Liberal Democrat Voice.