Ugh… the blog awards season appears to be upon us again.  I am still getting over the nastiness that was last year’s awards.

I’ll say this up front: I don’t put too much stock in any of these blog awards even though I have been a finalist in some of them in years past.  For one, there is no single association or standards committee that handles the awards like the Oscars, Emmys, or Tonys have.  Many of these awards have been created by websites or groups I’ve never heard of before, and it seems little more than a cheap stunt to drive traffic to their sites.  I’m especially suspicious about the ones that carry ads (as opposed to contest sponsors) on their voting and results pages.  Those pages quickly rack up thousands of page views and make a hell of a lot of money for the award site’s owner.

Secondly, many of these "awards" let you vote multiple times so that the award itself is nothing more than a popularity contest.  Very few of them define the methods that they use to arrive at their finalists.  Were they names picked out of the hat?  Were they decided on by nominations from the blogosphere?  Or were they chosen because the administrators of the awards felt these sites would bring in the most amount of votes and therefore page views?

Finally, it seems like some of the best blogs in a category fail to get nominated.  I’ve said before that I think David of Someone in a Tree should be a finalist in many of these contests because he represents some of the most important aspects of blogging: quality and consistency while keeping his focus on his life as a gay man.  Yet David has never been nominated for an award to my knowledge and admittedly poor memory.  Likewise, there are many of you out there who write fantastic blogs that also deserve nominations but are overlooked.  I would love to single out all the blogs that I think are award-worthy, but it’s probably easier if you just go look at my blogroll.

Now it may sound like I have a bad case of sour grapes.  I know that I would think that if I read this blog post, but I really don’t.  I would love to see some sort of official blog award be created with clearly defined nomination and voting processes.  I’ve been nominated and have won awards in the past, but honestly, I have always thought there are people out there who have deserved the award more than me.  I just put up some eye candy, and suddenly my blog got popular.  It’s still drivel though. 

Nevertheless, now that I’ve thoroughly removed all the joy from their nominations, I was quite pleased to see two of my regular reads as finalists in this year’s 2007 Weblog Awards (though I think more than one award contest is using that name).  They are:
 

• The Billerico Project for Best LGBT Weblog: Think of The Billerico Project as the love child created if The Huffington Post and our infamous "gay agenda" were to mate;

-and-

• I Am Bossy for Funniest Blog : I just love Bossy to death.  Her blog is one of those that makes me snort my two-buck chuck through my nose while reading it.

 
Now I would never tell you who to vote for (oh who am I kidding?), but you can vote for The Bilerico Project here and I Am Bossy here.  From what I understand, you can vote in each category once per day so keep going back again and again and again.

I’m not trying to diss any of the other finalists*, but I don’t think you can go wrong with either of these two blogs winning their categories.  They are both excellent in their own way.  Best of luck and sincere congratulations (despite what I said above) to both of them.
 

*OK… maybe one blog, but I’ll never tell so don’t even ask.  If you know me then you already know which site I mean.

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