Not all blogs are the same of course, but there's a big difference between the bloggers with a large base of readers due to lots of friends and family and those who are media-based.
Dry Bones is great, but he has been featured in the Jerusalem Post for decades. He shouldn't be running in JIB Awards against ordinary bloggers, even the megas. The same goes for Tamar Yona of Arutz 7. She's a major radio personality there.
In the days of the Israeli Chassidic Band contests on Israel TV, The Diaspora Yeshiva Band was out of the running after it won a few times.
I'm in a rush this morning, so I'm not providing the links, sorry.
Hi Batya,
ReplyDeleteI understand where you are coming from and I agree somewhat.
Dry Bones does have a great blog and it is very popular.
Tamar Yonah however, may be a 'major radio personality', but she certainly is not a 'major' blogger.
Check her technorati ranking here
Rank: 536,218 (22 links from 9 blogs). It seems she gets hardly any traffic to her blog, yet she managed to get almost 200 votes all up in the 2 categories she was nominated in, even beating Aussie Dave in one of them!
Now, I ask, these are 'blogging' awards aren't they?
I don't remember the JIB's being radio awards?!
It was never supposed to be a popularity contest, it is supposed to be about awarding quality blogs, but now it seems its a contest who can rort the voting the most, it seems you don't really even need to have a blog.
That's my point exactly. Various bloggers sent requests to all sorts of email lists asking their friends to do them a "favor" and vote for them.
ReplyDeleteThe results are a distortion, but that's human nature, and that's why I tried to keep from active campaigning.
You and your husband are actively involved in the jcarnivals, which I think have the potential to do much more for jblogging than the awards.
Love you!
the awards are a popularity contest and benefit those who have name recognition outside blogging
ReplyDeleteand of course there's a subtrend of people who run various kinds of marketing and financial blogs who are very aggressive at finding ways to promote themselves
awards like this are not a mechanism for rewarding the best blogs-- they're a mechanism for driving traffic and controversy
They got the controversy. But that's par for the course.
ReplyDeleteThere's never a truly even playing field.
The organizers tried; it's not easy.
This is a very valid point that we didn't consider. There are now professional blogs, organization blogs, and blogs as an accessory of another major activity (web site, radio program, etc).
ReplyDeleteIt's going to be hard to figure out how to segregate them, but must be done in the future. As far as this year is concerned, I think we're too far in to be making that kind of change.
(Examples in this years awards, not all of which did well, we have 1 blog that runs on the Jerusalem Post web site, 1 that runs on the Israel National News web site, 2 by people who have radio programs, 1 associated with a magazine, and 3 associated with organizations.)
Dry Bones is an ultra hard case, because he takes his professional cartoon, but adds back commentary that you can find no where else. And, the blog isn't professionally associated with his offline activity.