Catholic Blog Awards Voting is Coming Today
Domenico Bettinelli notes that voting for the Catholic Blog Awards is coming, and gives some background into how the finalists in the various categories have been chosen:
Now some people are already predicting problems with the voting, but such concerns are ill-placed. Yes, last year there were some questions and concerns that blogs no one had heard of were being nominated and voted for in great numbers -- leading to speculation of vote tampering -- while others complained that worthy blogs were not even put on the ballot.My Comments:
Josh [LeBlanc] has tried to address these concerns by asking a group of bloggers to assist him as a nomination committee. I am one of them. After the nominations were submitted, Josh tabulated the results -- 120 blogs in 21 categories! -- and sent the list to the committee. Our task is to vet the nominees, ensuring that those who are nominated actually belong on the list. We are also winnowing the final nominees down to five per category to make voting less unwieldy and the results more definitive. Each committee member can use his own criteria, but my preferred method was to choose the top five nomination-getters unless there was no clear favorite, in which I tried to use my own method to discern the most deserving blogs. We also weeded out any blogs that simply didn’t belong on the list. For example, if I couldn’t figure out if it was really a “Catholic” blog, and it wasn’t listed in any of the Catholic blog directories, then I it didn’t make my list. Frankly, I didn’t find a single blog that didn’t belong.
(emphasis added)
For what it's worth, I do NOT expect Pro Ecclesia * Pro Familia * Pro Civitate to be among the 5 finalists for any of the categories in which this blog arguably qualifies and/or for which I have been told by some of my readers that they have nominated me:
- Most Informative Blog
- Best Political Analysis
- Best New Blog
- Best Social Commentary Blog
And that's fine. I am truly honored that anyone wants to read what I have to say about anything, and I am most gratified by those who thought this blog worthy of a nomination in any category. While it would be wonderful to have the hit counts of some of the more established blogs, I am humbled by those who choose to come here on a daily or weekly basis to see what I have to say.
Which brings me to the first purpose of this post: to thank all of you who have contributed to this blog by commenting, offering suggestions, or even just lurking over the past year since this blog started in March of 2005. I am gratified by the friends that I have made during my 11 months in this little corner of cyberspace.
The second purpose of this post is to encourage all of you to vote for those blogs that really deserve the honor of being the "best" in the categories for which they've been nominated. It sounds like those tasked with choosing the top 5 nominations for each category have attempted to identify only those blogs that truly belong in a given category, and we should be thankful to them for spending their time and effort to put these Awards together. A special thanks to Josh at cyberCatholics.com for organizing and sponsoring the Catholic Blog Awards.
posted by Pro Ecclesia 12:01 AM
12 comments
12 Comments:
Don't sell yourself short Jay! Maybe I have a bias but I find several of the "small" Catholic blogs to be a lot better than some with huge numbers of readers.
Well, Jay, you can't purely judge on TTLB ranking, and I'm sure you know that. But if it makes you feel better, I'll Blogroll you.
Thanks St. JimBob. I do appreciate that.
But really, I'm not trolling for links - I posted this because some people have told me that they nominated me, and I wanted to thank them while at the same time acknowledging the reality that this blog probably didn't get enough votes to rank in the top 5 of any category.
I think the method mentioned above is pretty stup-- err..short-sighted. After all, does Amy Welborn or Mark Shea really need another pat on the back? There are a ton of smaller blogs out there that are excellently done. Don't they deserve some recognition? Shouldn't they have a chance to shine? Just having a blog nominated would give many smaller places a ton of traffic as well as an opportunity to gain links and new regular readers. How would the niche grow if they have the same few large blogs time after time?
Besides, if folks on the committee look at the top nomination getters for each category in order to prevent "vote fraud" during the voting, how do they prevent "nomination fraud"? Most folks with gmail have something like 100+ gmail invites sitting around, after all. If you really were desperate to get in, it wouldn't be a problem to create dozens of throwaway accounts.
That is, it wouldn't be a problem except for the whole, "if you do that, you've got a problem" thing.
I'm hoping to see In Veritate Ambulare, Bill Hennessy, and a ton of others that I think do an excellent job at least get the honor of a nomination.
As for myself, I really don't care. After all, I am the biggest blogger in Nex Mexico and noone can take that away from me.
Der Tommissar makes a lot of sense. It sounds pretty socialist, but it makes a lot of sense.
;)
And I agree with you 100% on Bill's blog - he deserves recognition. One of the things I've most proud of since I began blogging is the positive review he gave this blog, which I have excerpted on the upper-right-hand side of the main page.
(I'm also pretty proud of that email you sent me regarding a well-known blustering and bloviating blogger, which I have not excerpted anywhere to protect the names of the guilty.)
Distributist, ya heathen.
Look, we're up against each other for Best Political Blog
Wow! I'm truly shocked to be among the finalists.
Now, Der Tommissar, what was that you were saying about the method for choosing the nominees?
Upon closer inspection, it looks as if DT was nominated in, like, every category.
What were you bitchin' about, man?
I am not a small blog; I rock hard and bring the noise.
I was talking about the smaller blogs that are really doing a great job and deserve more recognition.
Off the top of my head, SFO Mom, RC Mommy, Traditio in Radice, Nobis Quoque Peccatoribus and a bunch of others.
Some of those folks are every bit as worthy of winning as anyone that was nominated (except of course, for me). It's just a shame that if you go by "nominating votes" those blogs get shut out without a chance.
People who read blogs and think Catholic will automatically thing Amy Welborn, Mark Shea, Jimmy Atkins, The Curt Jester and the Anchoress. The really cool and knowledgeable ones will also add me to that list.
If you have five slots in a category, there are only a few spots left open for someone note as well known.
"If you have five slots in a category, there are only a few spots left open for someone not as well known."
That's why I'm shocked to have made it among the 5 finalists. I can think of a number of blogs that I'm surprised didn't make it ahead of this one:
Catholics in the Public Square
Hennessy's View
Mirror of Justice
On the Square
Professor Bainbridge
Red Guy in a Blue State
Rerum Novarum
Res Publica et Cetera
Thoughts of a Regular Guy
(and others I know I've missed)
Congrats Jay!
Thanks, Darren!
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