The nominations for the Fourth Annual Weblog Awards are out and awaiting your votes.
Of those who are more than likely to be getting my votes, Dave Shea has been nominated for best Best Canadian Weblog and Best Web Development Weblog.
Dunstan has been nominated for Best Programming of a Weblog. I’m not sure what ‘best programming’ means, but Dunstan’s XHTML and CSS are exemplorary and he has some very cool and original JavaScript going on with his comment system. There’s also a few nifty bits of PHP for his blogged people and blogged domain pages. [Update: Somehow I forgot about the weather banner – the real clincher.]
Tom Coates, who normally loathes blog awards has been nominated in four categories, notably Lifetime Achievement Award and Best Article or Essay About Weblogs for his thought provoking article Weblogs and the mass amateurisation of nearly everything. [Update: note Tom’s comment to this post clarifying his position on weblog awards.]
Tom Coates wrote:
To be fair, although it’s true that I have problems with weblog awards in general, I have way more problems with the way the Guardian handled it than the way the Bloggies do it. Here’s a slightly shrill excerpt from my conversation with Simon Waldman about the Guardian’s first weblog awards:
The things that make weblogs special and different to other media are exactly the things that make large-scale media awards for them redundant.
Weblogs are not (just) written to entertain audiences, but are also spaces where people can talk openly about their lives. Asking people to compete in self-revelation, to play up to the cameras, seems wrong to me!
Webloggers aren’t prostituting themselves for cash. In fact one important aspect is to have a place for yourself, somewhere personally important. Asking people to expose themselves for cash seems wrong to me!
Most webloggers form friendships with both readers and other webloggers. An external body encouraging competition between friends also seems wrong to me.
And the Bloggies? They’re incomparable [ ... ] most importantly, it’s an award in which every participant, every judge and every voter is a weblogger or weblog reader (and an equal) rather than an inexpert “real-life big name”, whose qualifications and ability to judge remain totally suspect.
From http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,765160,00.html
Tom Head wrote:
Possibly Dunstan’s award for programming is due to his banner, which changes according to the weather and time of day (I recall some discussion of it a month or so ago).
Phil Wilson wrote:
Tom Head is right and Dunstan’s colophon explains a little more about it.
Rich wrote:
How could I forget Dunstan’s weather image. Doh!