Boy scout got merit badges
The annual SA Blog Awards were handed out last night. This blog didn’t get any first prizes, but despite only having been launched in June last year, got a few merit badges for being among the runners-up in three categories. Sadly, those exclude the one I kinda wanted: best green blog.
Given the competition, many bloggers were unsurprised at the winners. As Bridget McNulty points out, there will be some griping in the blogosphere.
The overall winner, deservedly, was the Mail & Guardian’s online opinion project, ThoughtLeader. I’ll desist from gushing too much about the impact it has had in the South African blogosphere and its coming of age, since I also blog there, as it happens.
Peas on Toast snapped up two more awards to add to her illustrious list of accolades, for best post and best original writing. Well done, and well deserved, on both counts, I might add. Her best post sounded terrifically familiar: How not to buy condoms. I’ve had exactly the same experience, with the added embarrassment that a long queue was forming behind me, and a cute girl towards the back called out, “Hi, Ivo! How nice to see you!” There’s a reason I didn’t blog about it…
Matt Buckland deserves an honourable mention for being involved with three of the winners (and Vince Maher for two of them): Best overall and best politics blog, ThoughtLeader, best business blog at matthewbuckland.com, and best blog about blogging for aggregator site Amatomu. Well done, Matt and Vince. You host excellent braais — sorry, Bloggerati/Digerati events — too.
Other winners were the most popular blog in South Africa, Mark Keohane’s sport blog, Cape Town Daily Photo for best travel blog, best design blog for the felicitously titled Skinny Laminx, best tech blog imod.co.za, best foreign blog by a South African and best food & drink blog to the delectably presented Cook Sister, Peak Performances for best music blog, best personal blog to the perennial So Close, and best photo blog to Jenty’s Photo-a-Day, not to mention Urban Sprout for carrying the banner of the orthodox green religion. Newly added to my feed reader is the country’s best undiscovered blog, written by a young girl with cystic fibrosis, who has the sense of humour to title her blog about how breathtaking life can be Living Life Breathlessly.
But, on to the gripes. ThoughtLeader was the Goliath that dominated the politics category. Competition from a site funded and promoted by a major weekly newspaper seems a little unfair to valiant pajama-clad Davids who are among my favourite blogs, such as Commentary South Africa, Politics.za and Alex Matthews’s AfroDissident. ThoughtLeader has at last count recruited over a hundred contributors to churn out copy. Despite such volumes its stated readership is only about 10 or 15 times my own meagre traffic numbers, which makes for an interesting object lesson in the law of diminishing returns. That none of us genuine bloggers — the solo kind — could cut it against a media-funded mega-blog is not entirely surprising.
Other categories saw similar scenarios. East Coast Radio has several corporate blogs, and between them, they swept all before it. Best new blog went to its NewsWatch site, best entertainment blog, most humorous blog, and best group blog all went to The BIG Breakfast Blog, and best podcast was snapped up by its Just Plain’s ‘On The Blog’. It would not surprise me if some bloggers feel a little put-upon to be routed by media personalities who get paid by their employers to blog, and who enjoy, for free, the promotional power of radio to boot.
To add to the confusion, ThoughtLeader, the best overall blog, was also a finalist in the group blog category, which ECR won, and despite having been launched in 2007 didn’t crack the new blog category. Ironic, not so?
It is true that, as one of the organisers explained to me, the ECR and ThoughLeader wins have a positive promotional spinoff for blogging in general. Their links to the winners could result in a traffic boost for runners-up, and it promotes blogging in general. I know I’ve discovered a few excellent blogs of which I had been unaware through participating in the awards.
Still, my solution would be to limit group blogs to the group blog category, so individual bloggers can’t go win the group category, and solo politics writers won’t have to take on entire armies in the politics category. Similarly, I’d establish a “commercial” category, for blogs that are funded and operated by commercial media organisations such as East Coast Radio. They’re not in the same weight division as regular bloggers who can’t hire full-time staff, so matching them up is going to cause bruises. If it seems unfair to ban a commercial blog from a particular category, perhaps the categories themselves should be split into amateur and commercial. The shortlist of nominated finalists in each category can then be halved, if organisers, judges and voters don’t want to face an overwhelming number of entries.
That said, I’m chuffed with my three merit badges. Armed thus, this nightwatch will stride resolutely onwards, putting barbarian heads on the spike as he valiantly defends individual liberty and market economics against pillaging socialists, fascists rulers and the invading green hordes.
Well, congrats! I didn’t miss the irony that a journalist like yourself is ranting about media-funded blogs beating the rest - yet I love the fact that you prefer to strike out bravely on your own. I prefer personal blogs myself: they don’t smack of corporate “you-may-not-talk-about-this” politics. I’d write one myself, but
a) my life is too boring, and
b) I’m too lazy.
Well done, again. Keep up the good “work”.
It’s true I’m a journalist, albeit working freelance. I blog in my spare time. I called it “the spike” for a number of reasons, one of which is because it’s where all the stuff that doesn’t get published for money goes. I don’t get paid for blogging, and my opportunities for promoting my blog in the media I work for are very limited. I see the possible objection, though, but to resolve it you’d then have to split the awards four ways: commercial blogs, group blogs, journo-blogs, and amateur blogs. It would be more sensible and managable to split it only once, into commercial and individual, with the former including group blogs with more than, say, four contributors, and the latter including individuals, whether they have day jobs as journalists or not. Each of those then gets the sport, politics, economics, environment, entertainment, personal and humour categories. After all, there’s little difference in skill between a good blogger and a good journalist.
As for your life not being interesting enough, very few people’s lives are interesting to others. Which is why I don’t as a rule blog about my life, and advise columnists to stop talking about themselves too. Readers really don’t want to hear that, suprise suprise, you had a terrible experience with the bank, in the traffic, or at Home Affairs, unless you can be very funny about it or can make a broader point beyond just whining. The exceptions invent a really entertaining persona, or have a regular supply of unusual experiences to relate.
So blog about something else: something about which you have expert knowledge, unique reporting access, or strongly argued opinions. That doesn’t solve the laziness problem, but I’d wager people would read it, at least.
Thanks for the compliments. Next year, we’ll see if the spike can conquer the green prize, or qualify for the commercial category. :-)
Thanks for the mention!
I wasn’t objecting - it was merely something that struck me while reading. I enjoy your blog - particularly the green bits (we happen to agree on the global warming issue) - and I firmly believe this blog belongs in the “individual” category.
Thanks for the feedback - and the advice.
Hmm, perhaps its just me, but I found the ‘best post’ very unoriginal and not even very funny. It’s a story that has been told and probably blogged/posted about a million times before.
Also its a shame not to see http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/silwane in the humorous category.
Agreed on Ndumiso Ngcobo. Very funny writer whose work I’ve linked to before. His piece in Maverick magazine on invading Zimbabwe was excellent (even if I disagree with some of the political assumptions underlying…).
Another humour site I missed was http://hayibo.com/. Decent satire is rare as hen’s teeth, and when SA gets some, it gets no recognition. It was my favourite for that category. Pity.
For what it’s worth, I thought your steadfast support of those fluffy cheetahs was worth first prize :D
No surprises in the politics category, for precisely the reasons you mentioned. I’m just honoured to be writing for a blog that even gets a mention. I never in my wildest dreams thought folks might actually read my stuff.
Your blog is pretty damned insightful, and considering that it’s relatively new, I might dare say that you might get the politics award next year, even with thoughtleader in the contention!
thanks for the comments ivo. i think maybe the blog awards needs to have separate corporate and individual categories… maybe that would solve some of the criticism?
That’d be the simplest way to solve the problem, yes. Also means the corporate blogs still get the recognition that rubs off on blogging generally.
The other criteria might need a bit of tweaking too. Take ThoughtLeader: is it a blog, a group blog, or a group of blogs? And under what conditions would it be a corporate blog, as a single group blog or as a group of single blogs? Could a TL blog be nominated individually? Should they be?
Nothing a bit of tweaking can’t fix, though. They’re a good idea and pretty well organised in general.