There’s some clarificatory statement on the story of the blog awards controversy from the recent podcast at [email protected].
On the other hand, Sean of “To the Tale, and Other Such Concerns” posted quite a lenghty dissection of what makes a good great blog and what makes it an award-winning piece. I’d like to highlight some of his thoughts here:
A blog can be nominated for good writing, and be acknowledged for that. A blog can be nominated for its influence across a wide audience, and it will be acknowledged for that. A blog can be nominated for its sheer number of referring links, its spotlight on relevant issues, its prolificacy in updates, its awesome graphic design, and millions of other aspects… and it will be acknowledged for those.
But a blog will be judged on the sum of its combined qualities. Each of the factors will be given an equally significant weighing with regards to the whole.
That is what a consensus is, ladies and gentlemen. It is an agreement between multiple entities who each have different ideas as to what makes a good blog in the first place.
That, I believe, is the essence of a true Blog Awards. We may or may not agree with any final decision that comes forth, but we must never let it be said that we do not try to accomplish this despite the differences. We should not judge a blog on the basis of a single quality that we just happen to hold higher than the rest of the reader population, if only because of the presence of a reader population in the first place.
There are aspects of quality out there other than the ones we hold close to our hearts. We can rant and rave all we want about whether or not certain things fulfill what we like to see in a weblog, but when it comes right down to it, we have to look at the big picture. We have to take things in as a whole. We need to reach a consensus with those around us.
Sean nails it quite decisively (read full entry). We see this situation everywhere — from Metro Manila Film Festivals to the Webby Awards and the such. That is the reason why popularity contests are much much easier to handle and organize because it merely deals with numbers and nothing else.
