And the winner is...

BLOG.COM/ Blog awards might sound strange, but they have their merits

By the time you read this column, voting will be underway in the final stage of the Sixth Annual Weblog Awards, also known as the 2006 Bloggies (https://bsmedia.business-standard.com2006.bloggies.com/). Votes are being cast in over 30 categories including political blogs, food blogs, photo blogs and regional sub-classifications (Asian, Latin American and so on).

The polls will close on January 31 and the winners, for reasons I'm not clear about, will be announced more than a month later. (Competition for the Oscars, perhaps!)

Hang on a minute, awards for blogging? How much more self-important and self-congratulatory can we get, right? At least, that's a question that was widely asked when the Indian Weblog Awards (http://indibloggies.org), the desi version of the Bloggies, held its third annual poll a couple of weeks ago.

The Indian blogosphere has grown exponentially over the past year, wh ich meant the field was much vaster than it had been in the first two editions, and many bloggers and blog-readers became aware of these awards for the first time.

The reactions ranged from "Don't competitive awards go against the very spirit of this medium?" to "How can you ensure it will be a fair process?"

Both good points, the first of them an echo of an argument that took place between the popular British blogger Tom Coates and The Guardian newspaper in 2002. "The things that make weblogs special and different to other media are exactly the things that make large-scale media awards for them redundant," said Coates, boycotting a competition by the newspaper to find "the best British blog".

But this is relevant only if you hold competitive awards up as definitive markers of what is the best in such-and-such field. That would be, pardon the language, a blockheaded notion. Any awards are subject to human failings, whimsies and biases.

The best-organised and most well-intentioned ones (and the ones with the most fail-safe voting procedures) will, by default, throw up a lot of deserving candidates - but they will overlook an equal number.

My own attitude to such awards, therefore, is: take them with a carton of salt. They are fun to watch and speculate about, but the final choices have as much to say about voting trends and mindsets as about the merits of the nominees.

Most importantly, any award show that has integrity is a good place to discover lots of little treasures. I was a rookie blog-reader when I first visited the Bloggies website, and it was my introduction to some of the finest weblogs around.

It was here that I first discovered Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net; weblog of the year for 2004 and 2005), one of the most entertaining and most widely read blogs in the world. It was here that I first clicked on the links to Dooce (http://www.dooce.com; most humorous weblog, 2005), Bookslut (http://www.bookslut.com/blog; best topical weblog, 2004) and a host of other sites that now occupy pride of place on my Bloglines list.

If you want to expand your online reading list, do surf the Bloggies site: you'll find great new blogs you'd never heard of before. And you can even vote - if you believe in competition, that is!

Jai Arjun Singh, aka Jabberwock, blogs at http://jaiarjun. blogspot. com