Back in a Bit

Last year, it was the Best British Blog Competition, and this year it’s the British Weblog Awards. Last year, many weblog authors, myself included, were very critical of the whole affair, and boycotted the competition. This year, however, such criticism is noticably absent. If anything, it has been greeted with comparative nonchalance.

For the 2002 awards, the basic idea was that a panel of judges would pick out the best British weblog, and give the author £1000, as well as five runners-up who would receive £500. What’s so bad about that? To start with, as was debated in great length at the time, defining the “best” weblog seemed to be an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. It implies a set of criteria, and it was hard to imagine any criteria that were appropriate to use for this purpose. What is it that makes a weblog “the best”? The look of it? The content? The number of gizmos? I lost count of the number of times I asked “what is the best vegetable” in an effort to highlight the challenge the Guardian had put before its appointed judges.

But in the appointment of those judges lurked another objection. A mish-mash panel of Guardian staff, people connected with weblogging, and people not really connected with weblogging at all: most notably Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop. The Guardian’s justification for this choice was that her eponymously-addressed site was a weblog. Sure, it features textual content arranged in reverse-chronological order, but it’s very far from being a weblog: indeed, there was even some dispute over how much of the content was written by Roddick herself.

(Now that I look at the site again, I see a mailto: link has been added to “email Anita”, and the address takes the form of anita@…. Strangely, this now appears to be the only actual link to an email address: all other addresses published have been obfuscated to reduce spam. Presumably then, if the anita@ address works and does go to Roddick herself, her inbox must be absolutely stuffed with unwanted mail. Anyway, enough already.)

To the Guardian’s credit, they handled the criticism very well. They stuck to their guns over last year’s competition: not that you’d expect them to do otherwise, but still it’s important to see things through. Also, they were open to the criticism—even running an article on the very subject based on an email debate between Simon Waldman (their director of digital publishing) and Tom—who I think it’s fair to say was the competition’s most prominent blackballer. And my praise doesn’t end there: when the details of this year’s competition were announced, it was clear that they’d taken the criticism on-board and applied it.

This year’s competition is a more delicate animal. Waldman, who’ll be chairing the judges, formally introduced it last month (referring to us old-timers as “vociferous”), having informally announced it to the UK weblog authors’ community the week before. The new title makes no reference to the words “best” or “competition”: a smart move. Also, there will be no overall winner this year: instead they’ve elected to choose winners within a number of defined categories. They’ve also reduced the prize fund to £500 across the board, but probably the greatest single improvement is within the selection of the judges. Not only are there more of them, but it would seem that effort has been invested to select judges who are appropriate for each category. The appointment of Jason, Nick and a selection of last year’s winners strikes me as probably the smartest move of all: these are people that have given credibility to weblogging and whose sites are held up as good examples of the genre. Also, Moby makes for a better token celebrity than Roddick—his weblog has long been known and recognised by the weblogging community (such as it is, and such as this matters).

In effect, they’ve addressed the main criticisms I’ve already highlighted and, as such, I intend to enter this year. While I had no interest in being recognised last year as being the author of the “best” weblog, I’d be quite happy to have my writing or designing skills evaluated by appropriate judges, and if they want to give me half a grand for doing something I would have done anyway, that’s fine. In short, I feel that I can take this year’s competition in the spirit with which it is intended.

That said, I think there are still many, many things that are wrong with the competition.

The issue of it being a competition (or awards, or whatever it is) exclusively for British weblogs still strikes me as strange. Of course the Guardian is a British paper, and therefore it’s just about possible to grasp their motive for promoting content in their own country, but it still doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. I don’t see why the Guardian doesn’t open it up to the whole world: if the production of independent content is something that needs encouragement and the support of a national newspaper in Britain, why should it not receive the same encouragement and support everywhere else in the world? If nothing else, weblogs have highlighted that political and geographical boundaries just don’t operate in the same way on the web. You’d think the paper that employed Salam Pax, and have placed him on the panel of judges for this very competition, would be only too aware of that fact.

Now, it’s only fair if I qualify this particular criticism. As you may know, I do a number of things specific to weblogging in Britain, besides living in Britain and writing a weblog. I run UKB, the long-standing email-based community of UK weblog authors, and I also maintain the list of UK weblogs that forms the basis of many of the other tools that provide information about weblogs in Britain (most notably the aggregator and the updated list). So it’d be fair to ask me why I’m involved in these UK-weblog-specific activities if I believe that nationality means little in the weblogging world.

In effect, my involvement with UK weblogs has nothing to do with nationality—it’s about proximity. One of the principle functions of UKB (and UKBloggers: its former single-list incarnation) is social. Long before it was fashionable, weblog authors in the UK would get together in pubs, drink large amounts of stupid cocktails, and generally enjoy each-other’s real-life company. Many good friendships (and even some relationships) have been formed by this process. Therefore, UKB isn’t really about weblogging, it’s about people. The fact that these people live in the same country or pursue a common interest is almost irrelevant: as such, membership of UKB is open to those outside of the UK and to those who don’t have weblogs (I mean, they probably wouldn’t find it desparately interesting or relevant, but they’re certainly not thrown out for not meeting these criteria).

The work that’s been done on the aggregator and other tools is really an extension of this idea. The aggregator shows you the latest content from a group of weblog authors, some of whom you know. Again, it’s more about people than it is about weblogs or their country of origin. The aggregator has another interesting feature: the fact that the listed sites share proximity (and, therefore, conventional media sources, language, govermment, law, celebrities, events etc.) means that it is possible to observe patterns in the aggregated content. The UK-based authors generally cover the same stuff as the rest of the world (recently: the release of Matrix Revolutions; the fact that self-destructing emails is just about the most stupid “idea” Microsoft have ever implemented; and how Christmas now seems to start seven months ahead of schedule, together with the usual, unpredicable content from unique journals), but also cover common issues that are not necessarily covered elsewhere (like the appointment of Michael “Mr Poll Tax” Howard as opposition leader or, indeed, the Guardian’s British weblog wingding).

However, despite the many interesting by-products of grouping weblogs by location, the competition doesn’t really tap into these at all. There’s no obvious attempt to promote or encourage content based on principally British issues, people, or whatever. The competition also fails to bring weblog authors together, like UKB does. The prerequisite of entry that the author must be British appears to be nothing more than a prerequisite of entry that the author must be British.

While I’m pleased to see an attempt at categorising entries and winners, I feel that not all the categories they’ve chosen are that great. Best Design and Best Written make sense: I have no problem with them, but the others strike me as tenuous. They’ve obviously tried to promote weblog authoring in the young with the Best Under 18 category, but again this strikes me as an exclusive rather than inclusive move. Think of it this way: it should be possible, if unlikely and undesirable, for one site to win in all categories. That’s inclusion. It means that they’d be rewarding a variety of different strengths a weblog could display. The author being under eighteen years of age is not a strength of a weblog. I couldn’t be under eighteen any more, even if I wanted to, and so this category does nothing but exclude us old farts. Besides, the young have never needed encouragement to do anything they regard as fashionable.

I don’t have the same depth of concern about the Best Use Of Photography category: it is, actually, a good example of an inclusion. My weblog doesn’t feature photographs and therefore wouldn’t be eligable to enter, but this is the result of a choice that I have made. Though I’m not sure I understand what they mean by best use of photography (surely there is only one use for photography: display), I suspect they’ve phrased it like that so that it doesn’t imply too heavily that they believe photography to be a requirement of a good weblog—at least, I hope that’s what they’re trying to do.

The Best Specialist category I don’t understand at all, particularly in light of last year’s criticisms. When they say “specialist” I take it they mean “dealing only with a narrow range of topics”. Again this is exclusive, and there’s such a broad range of topics on which a weblog could narrowly be focussed, this category would seem to be just as unquantifiable as last year’s competition. Much like with the whole nationality issue, being “specialist” is a prerequisite to entry. The entrants will be judged not on how specialised they are (or, at least, they shouldn’t be), they’ll be judged on criteria such as quality of writing, design, research etc.

“Okay then, smart-arse” I hear you think. Criticism is easy—what would you suggest? Well, while I applaud them for acting upon last year’s criticisms, I still think it’s too little, too late. This year they’ve managed to create a competition that would have been appropriate last year. They themselves acknowledge that “Over the past year, blogging has grown, in both importance and size. [sic]“, and it certainly has. But this isn’t something we can only observe retrospectively: it was obvious that this would happen even without Google’s Blogger buyout and everything else that has filled column-inches. As such, I feel that the Guardian’s most comfortable role in weblogging is in helping it to evolve. I’m absolutely astounded that they’ve chosen not to reward people who have propelled or are propelling the evolution or expansion or importance of weblogging. This is exactly what they should be doing.

There are people out there who are coming up with nice little tricks, tools and ideas to improve weblogging for everyone. Hacks for content management systems; bits of code that let a blogger do something they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do; whole fancy new technologies to improve publication and syndication; developing communities amongst weblog authors, even those bloody awful “which x are you” quizzes… whatever. So much has been done to bring weblog authors closer to their readers, each other, and everyone else. Individual webloggers, the small guys, have achieved more for weblogging than the papers have. Getting hold of Salam Pax shows that the Guardian knows what I’m talking about here, and yet this competition does nothing for the future of weblogging as a whole. It’ll just make some of us richer.

I propose a small cultural shift. I propose we stop concerning ourselves with which weblog is best. It’s pointless: if nothing else, weblogs amuse their authors, and every weblog is the best weblog at this. If I were running the competition, I’d focus it entirely on those who have contributed to weblogging, not just to their own weblog (In fact, if I were running it, I wouldn’t be running it—I’d approach the existing community that weblog authors set up for themselves and support them in running it). I’d encourage and reward the altruistic, the imaginative, and the revolutionary.

I suppose that, in general, I’m still uncomfortable with the Guardian’s belief that the competition is “an annual show case [sic] of the best of British blogging”. I really don’t think it is. I think this year’s is closer to that vision than last year’s was, and that it’s a far more transparent process, but it’s still wide of the mark they set themselves. The best of British blogging is the fact we’re doing it in the first place. Or maybe I’m being vociferous.