Wooo-hooo!
The
NZ Netguide Web Awards Finalists have been
announced, and I'm in the running for Best Personal Blog. Thanks to all you regular readers who took the time to vote, and hello to the many new readers who have been coming this way as a result.
Pretty long odds on me winning the thing - here's how I see it panning out...
The Contenders...
publicaddress.net
Now, if I was going to get picky (and yes, I'm about to), this isn't really a 'personal' blog, is it? It's a collection of blogs under one banner. If the contest was for personal blogs, the individual blogs within would have been nominated on their own merits (
Hard News and
Cracker being the obvious choices - for me, anyway). It did win last year though, so the precedent has been set, and it's hard to see them not being hot favourites again this year, with a massive readership and a high non-blogosphere public profile.
idolblog.com
This is probably the main competition for publicaddress, in that it's been wildly successful, had a lot of mainstream coverage, and no doubt gets a truckload of traffic. But, having said all that, again, it's not really a 'personal' blog in the traditional (traditional being 2001) sense of the word. While 'The Critic' and 'Admin' appear to be the main posters on the main page, the whole thing is really a massive community-driven forum designed to facilitate information sharing (ie. gossip, criticism and unbridled fawning) of the NZ version of the American Idol craze.
The Dark Horses...
kiwiblog.co.nz
David Farrar's excellent site is a personal blog in the truest sense of the phrase. It's all his own work, he's prolific, and one of the best political bloggers in NZ. He updates regularly (even to the point of tabulating not just how many posts all the other political bloggers are making, but also how many
comments their blogs are attracting). If the judges can look beyond the glitz and glam of idolblog, and the sheer weight of numbers that publicaddress generates, kiwiblog might just slip in there down the inside...
bizgirl.blogspot.com
Me! Still quite excited. If they were going to give out the award based on a words-per-post criteria, I'd be a shoe-in.
Total outsider...
tylerryan.orcon.net.nz
a.k.a. Tyler Ryan 2004. Never heard of the site before, and I'd like to think I was pretty au fait with the NZ neck of the blogosphere. Now, no offence to Tyler, but
no-one even links to the site - one of the keystones of blog worthiness, surely. Beyond recent mentions in relation to the awards, there's not even any action on
technorati. He averages an update every
three weeks or so, and his entire archive can be viewed on
one not-too-large page. My only explanation for this blog being a finalist over literally dozens of other more worthy NZ blogs (off the top of my head:
supergood,
promenade,
tam I am,
ms. behaviour,
hubris,
noizyblog,
fighting talk,
short and sweet,
the backyard) is that the category is being sponsored by
Orcon, and Tyler's site is hosted on, umm, Orcon. Or is that just a conspiracy theory too many?
Anyway, I'm obviously just making up excuses before the event, so little hope do I hold out. The real kicker is that having given up any chance of being a finalist, I didn't book any tickets to go to the big event this friday in Auckland, so, despite my
claims that I was over awards ceremonies this year, I
will be feeling slightly disappointed that I'll be sitting at home on Friday night, instead of being at the Auckland Hyatt Regency, partaking in the free food and wine, and generally having a good time of it.
I won't mind so much if I win, though. Fingers crossed.
