So I'm looking at the ballot for the 2011 Bloggies, and I notice a few curious things (aside from the fact that I haven't heard of most of these sites, which is itself not that surprising):
- The somewhat venerable BoingBoing is listed as being a science blog? I mean, yeah, science is one of the things that they like to go back to over and over again, but that's like saying Kottke.org is a skateboarding blog. Or claiming that Anil Dash is a Prince blogger.
- If we were to take the nominations as being representative of the blogosphere (can we even use that word anymore?), it would seem that a full 80% of photoblogs out there focus on food photography. And that seems a bit improbable.
- Which brings me to my next point, which is that one blog in particular managed to get itself nominated in the "Best Photography," "Best Food", "Best Parenting", "Best-Designed", "Most Humorous", "Best Writing", and "Blog of the Year" categories. Now, I'm no Nate Silver, but gIven that there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of blogs out there in the world, this seems.... statistically improbable.
- Related, of course, is the problem that the nomination pool itself doesn't seem that large, and this can visually be borne out by the fact that the vast majority of the sites have a certain... sameness to them, both in design, topic, and general worldview. I think the world can do better...
On the other hand, the design of the site itself is pretty nifty.
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