Back in a Bit

Charlie Brooker for The Guardian: “I’m trying to work out why Bush is afforded any kind of credence or respect whatsoever in his native country. His performance is so transparently bizarre, so feeble and stumbling, it’s a miracle he wasn’t laughed off the stage.”

And Bush’s reaction? Of course, he’s delighted.

A Guardian/ICM survey with interesting results: “A majority of British voters now say they disagree with the idea that American democracy remains a model to other nations—and that from a country which still retains a monarchy and does not have a written constitution.”

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.

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