Best of
: The Guardian launches its best of British blog contest.
Why just British?
By that standard, their own Salam Pax would not win.
And, by the way, half the judges are even in Britain.
So why just British?
11 responses to “Best of”
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Eh, Jeff, leave it alone– there are differences.
Have you ever seen their little feature called ‘Perma Chat?’ Most Americans, unless quite well-read and maybe cosmopolitan would be just bewildered by it. They wouldn’t see anything funny about it.
Yes, there are cultural differences between a preponderance of their weblogs and a preponderence of ours. And I’m not a supporter of Homoginization of everyone’s culture.
I don’t find many of theirs very interesting, but to each his own taste.
And at least the differences can give us some perspective on our own thing or project. Just what are we each doing with our own little spot in cyberspace, hmmm…?
It is also true that I started blogging myself due in large part to Neil McIntosh at The Guardian.
But that’s probably like a Czech kid saying he’s been culturally influenced by the music section of the Village Voice.
File this one in the ‘Life Can Be Complicated’ Dept. I am opposed to Homoginization of everyone’s culture. But then I listened to an audio entry by Neil a couple of weeks ago. And I could only understand about every other word due to his very thick Scottish brogue. Thank God he did not give blogging directions on tape by his dictation, or I would have been completely lost. LOL. Who knew?! Boy, that was unexpected :-) I listened to it again, but with not much more comprehension than the first time. I was stunned.
Sorry I took up so much space, but sometimes you raise intriguing questions. -
I guess the Brits still seem to think they have their own unique history, culture and nation state independant of the US. Imagine!
Seriously though, it’s no different than sponsoring a Brit music, book, or film award.
Though yeah, I’d be interested in seeing what award they would give out, if the competition was global. And how many of these awards would be given to non-English (language) blogs? -
Jeff,
The British blog scene is very young and has not attracted all the media attention that the US blogscene has.
Now a newspaper comes along and tries to promote British blogs and you are complaining?
Almost all the articles in the British press about blogging have talked about Pundit and Sullivan etc and ignored us, so it is a refreshing change for us to get a bit of attention from our own media.
I really don’t see what your problem is. -
This isn’t about British blogs. I would like to subscribe to The Week but I want to see what everyone likes about it. I’m in Canada and there doesn’t seem to be any provision for Canada in your address options. How do I do it? BTW I’m a conservative who considers living beside the US is the best thing that ever happened to this country of Canada. So help me help you. I’ll buy the mag. I just need to see if I like it. If not I’ll send you C$10 anyway.
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Harry: The Guardian has made a big point of attracting an American and a worldwide audience and, thanks to the Internet, of it now being an international newspaper. So this just seemed a big parochial to me. If an American publication gave an America-only prize, I’d say the same thing (and so, I suspect, would you).
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Also strange because a good number of the judges are not British.
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Jeff,
The truth is, sadly, that most Americans don’t understand what is being talked about on British blogs and most Brits can’t follow (or aren’t interested in) the debates on American sites.
They are speaking to different audiences, addressing different agendas and that is completely normal.
Despite the internet the Guardian remains a British paper read by British people. It is perfectly normal that it looks at British blogs.
You guys get enough attention after all.
As for parochial, well there are few things more parochial than the American blogosphere.
For example my site gets linked by almost all the British political blogs.
In contrast I feature on four American blogrolls despite the fact that the bulk of content at Harry’s Place has been about Iraq, Israel, Iran and the role of the US in the world. I even have an American contributor.
I’m not particularly interested in attracting more American links but I am very interesting in promoting British weblogs and the Guardian is helping in that process.
Do you think Instapundit winning that award would help British blogs develop? -
Harry:
Then you should be pissed that they had to rely on judges in America, eh? Why not make it all-British?
And I don’t want to hear any whining when an American site rewards American blogs….
Something tells me you’re reverting to communism. You’re getting so darned argumentative. ;-) -
Why just British blogs?
I guess for the same reason that the Pulitzer is awarded to American publications…because that’s what the sponsor of the award has chosen to honour. Does it need to be more complicated than that? -
good point on the pulitzer: the guardian is a british newspaper, it is aiming to promote blogging in britain. why does the booker prize only apply to commonwealth writing in english? because that’s the target audience, and it’s intended to promote this stuff that doesn’t get promoted otherwise.
yes, you are correct, the guardian’s online operation is very important, but it’s still fairly heavily used by homegrown audiences. you are also ignoring the very, very hard work put into the print publication to promote weblogs. this is not an internet-only competition, it also runs in the newspaper itself. as such it would probably be unfair to present it as anything else.
and the reason there are lots of american judges on the panel is (a) they are respected in their field – the same of which cannot be said about many british webloggers – and (b) they are somewhat detached from the british scene; hence there will be fewer claims of personal interest, insider voting etc.
there is also the consideration of manpower – even with a limited geographical area to cover, it’s going to take us a lot of man hours to sort through the entries and come up with a longlist: we simply haven’t got the time or human resource to run a global competition and give due attention to the hundreds of thousands of entries it would most likely generate.
we thought long and hard about the competition (which also ran last year) and have made some important changes. opening it up to a global audience however would be a sea-change that would alter the motivations behind the competition and level of resource needed to power it. i’d say that was a step too far at this stage.
(having said that, this is all in an entirely unofficial, unsanctioned capacity.) -
Here’s what I said to Harry in an email exchange:
I’m not trying to set off a transoceanic feud. Instead, I’m saying that I’m coming to think of the Guardian as a worldwide paper and weblogs as a worldwide medium. Uh-oh: media globlization? No, let’s not go there. You think that American blogs are ahead of their British compatriots. But I don’t think so; most American media are pooh-poohing this medium as well. In fact, the Guardian is the most blog-aware paper in the world. So I am/we are just jealous.
