Recognizing the Fifth Estate
Don’t forget to vote in the 2006 Weblog Awards. You can vote once a until December 15. We know you probably want to vote for us, but we’re sorry to say that we’re not actually up for anything this year. Just like last year. And the Year before that. So since you can’t vote for us, we’re tell who you you should vote for. And you will listen, you mindless drone. Here comes the Dorkaton, after the jump
We have skipped the categories in which we have no heard of any of the finalists. Ha. Our blogroll may be long, but the list of blogs we actually read is small. You caught us!
Best Blog – We’d like to vote for Gawker, Wonkette. We’re voting for the Huffington Post in this category, though it looks like Daily Kos may already have it in the bag. We have to say that we were initially skeptical of the HuffPo, mostly because we though Ariana Huffington was a pretty obnoxious socialite bitch. But as it turns out, Ariana has a relatively sincere change of heart and has created a much needed hub for progressive debate on the web. Also, since we’re judging this thing based on its observal social impact, we think Ariana’s headlines are the most important part. We don’t have to comb the web for this stuff anymore, or depend on Drudge like we used to. We don’t even really read the blog posts, because who cares. This is our major problem with Kos. We’re not that interested in lefty wingnut rating or the minutia of Democratic politics, so all in all Kos is pretty usless to us.
As for the other contenders: Aside from Post Secret, who cares about any of them? Especially Michelle Malkin who is an absolute cunt of the highest order. Why not Post Secret? We are as voyeuristic as the next guy, so we love PS. It clearly opened up a entirely new frontier in web-based Art. So all of that is very interesting, but hey. Who fucking cares. We have a war to end.
Best Individual Blog – Um, well, we haven’t heard of most of these, but we’re going to go with Talking Points Memo. Not only he take his name from Bill O’Reilly, but he’s actually broken news, all by his lonesome. We don’t remember what or when. But trust us. This guy is good. Also, he said some pretty funny shit that time Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face for no reason.
Best Online Community – What, no MySpace? Well, fine. In that case we’ll pay our dues to Kos. Because this is really what they are. And every now and then they will collectively say something useful that we can repost or just go ahead and steal. Thanks guys. Keep up the good work over there, and let us know when you’re wind-powered tour bus is ready to roll.
Best Liberal Blog – Bitch Ph.D., without even thinking. Obviously. Duh.
Best Conservative Blog – Ok, ok. We admit it. We voted for Michelle. But it was unintentional. We were jerking off and searched “Asian + ‘Cunt Mouth’” and guess who came up? Thanks, Cunt Mouth, for helping us get the job done.
Best Centrist Blog – Gun-Toting Liberal, because we love a paradox. And also, being in the center of anything is for retards.
Best Media Blog – Eat the Press
Best Photoblog – Cute Overload.
Best Gossip Blog – Where the fuck is Wonkette? Where? Nowhere. We’ll tell you why: Crossover appeal. Gotta be careful not to split the vote, people. Anyway, since Wonkette’s not up for this we voted Perez Hilton, which is currently winning. Though it’s a pretty tight race.
Best Music Blog - This was a tough call. Last year, we would have voted Stereogum. Now, we feel stereogum has jumped the shark (this became apparent to us when Microsoft invited Scott to a demo of Zune). So, we voted My Old Kentucky Blog. Maybe we’re wrong, but that’s what we did.
Best Podcast – This was a really hard one! We’re going to tell you that this is the first category in which we intend to vote for more than one nominee over the course of the Vote. Right off the bat, we voted for This American Life, which is obviously a treasure of a radio program that has been on NPR for more than 10 years. We love this program, it’s priceless. But, that’s just it! It’s a 10 year-old radio program, and, frankly, isn’t part of New Media revolution, though they were quick to understand its importance. Episodes of TAL have been available on audible.com forever. But, ok, this disqualifies TAL for us, because we want someone who has been an innovative New Media outlet to win. But Guess what? There isn’t really anybody who has an interesting podcast that fits the bill nominated! So we’re going to vote a couple of times for Slate and a couple of times for On the Media, and then vote for TAL until voting closes. Next year, we’re paying more attention to the nominating process.
Best Video Podcast
This is a higly contentious category as well. We will be splitting our vote in this one as well, because a lot of people deserve recognition here. Though we hate that the video arms of a couple well-known political blogs were included in this category. Crooks and Liars and HotAir can easily rally their cult-like following to win this thing, when they’re not necessairly the ones breaking new ground in this area.
That said, We’re voting for Alive in Baghdad and Ask a Ninja. Alive in Baghdad is doing really important work and they have basically developed a model to challenge mainstream media coverage of world-shaping events. Rocketbook often gets credit as being one of the first Vlogs. While that’s probably true, they are a blog about blogging and other tech stuff, and while it’s often pretty amusing, they are pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. And if fucking Lonleygirl15 wins, that will be stupid. Though in the authoring of that last sentence, the importance of Lonelygirl was driven home for us: Firefox 2′s spell check feature recognizes Lonleygirl15 as a word. Anyway, Ask a Ninja is hilarious. It’s our Lonleygirl15 counter-argument. It’s really funny, frequently updated, and shows how anybody with talent and a fresh idea can cut through all the bullshit on the internet, while Lonely girl was just someone’s marketing stunt. The lonelygirl phenomena ended abruptly when this became clear, because people were only interested in it because of what it seemed to be: homegrown television. Ask A Ninja is this for real.
Best Video of the Year – Diet Coke and Mentos.
