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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The reverse-chronological arrangement of weblog posts has frustrated me for years. It’s a format that works for about the first week in the life of a weblog, and after that it becomes more and more of a headache.
One of the most basic principles of information architecture is that the good stuff should float to the top. Of course, what that means in real terms comes down to your definition of “good”. In the world of weblogs (and many, many other varieties of sites), this refers to the most recently added content, hence the reverse-chronological ordering of posts. But is the most recent thing you’ve written necessarily the good stuff?
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Curling is all very well, but it’s not very now. See, this things come and go with fashion and, sadly, Curling’s days are long gone. You just don’t see the kids going out Curling of an evening any more. Nobody cares.
So what are the kids up to right now, I hear you ask. Good question. Well, the game everybody is talking about is called Blogger Bashing. The rules are very simple: now that so-called weblogs and so-called weblogging culture are at least three years beyond being worthy of intelligent editorial, you simply have to write on the subject. This doesn’t necessarily involve owning, writing, contributing to, or (apparently) reading any weblogs—but the object is to become the world’s authority on them. Moreover, points are awarded for attempting to point out to the uninformed (assuming they exist) that they’re pointless, boring, egocentric, fashionable or passé. Basically, the more up yourself you are, the better you’re doing.
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