Posts
Manchester Blogging Awards: Non Political Categories
As the overlord of political blogging in the United Kingdom if not the world - Iain Dale - has no doubt discovered, if you're going to run a Blogging Award or rankings you'd better have a tin hat handy. So hat's off to the Yankunian behind Manchizzle who has taken the strain for Manchester's burgeoning blog community.
Let's leave the best 'til last and rattle through the first of the non-political shortlists:Best writing on a blog:
Untitled Supermarket Nightmare/Day of Moustaches
Blog Post Frequency (BPF): Most days, twice a week minimum
Comments Per Post (CPP) Allowed, low volume
LOL's Ten-word Review (LTR): Initial caps-less (ugh), writer's personal blog, includes novel on 'Supermarket Nightmare'
Blog Humour Quotient (BHQ): Quite good
Blog We Like? (BWL): Yes
Available Blog Stats (ABS): None
Airport Diaries
(BPF): Five posts since August
(CPP) Allowed, low volume
(LTR): Unravelling blogger, unemployed possibly unemployable, sharing stress, albeit very slowly
(BHQ): Pretty grim
(BWL): Too slow
(ABS): None
A Free Man in Preston
(BPF): Weekly until shortlisted four weeks ago, total blogger's block
(CPP) Allowed, low volume
(LTR): Used to blog airport paperback-ese ... shortlisting finally conquered this trait.
(BHQ): Modest
(BWL): Might be a grower
(ABS): Averaged 600 visitors a week over three years
Community Fair
(BPF): Has it moved? Nothing since March 2007, before that June 2006
(CPP) Allowed, almost unusued
(LTR): Unused blog? Ex Group Therapy Blog? A Sock Puppet's Playground?
(BHQ): Dry, as in bones
(BWL): No fun deceased
(ABS): None available
I was going to run through the lot. But this category has been depressing. Perhaps later. Here are the other nominations. Barring the political.Best personal blog:
Gooseania
Notebooks
Single Mother on the Verge
Crinklybee
Best arts and culture blog:
Fictionbitch (aka The Tart of Fiction)
Mancubist
The Ring Modulator
The Console (music and visual)
Best new blog:
The Shoe Project
Get Weird Turn Pro
Words Dept.
Renter Girl
3 comments:
Back in 2005, I wrote a feature on blogging for City Life (RIP) and in the course of my research came across a total bollocks project (which I pretended was innovative and trendy) funded by the Arts Council and Trafford MBC to encourage online writing i.e. literary blogs.
In addition, they were supposed to create an online map of the city's literary heritage, on which bloggers would be marked.
The domain has been allowed to lapse, but check out Google's cache to see how far they got:
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:2sh-0sdHWk8J:www.nwpassages.co.uk/news.html+%22North+West+Passages%22+manchester&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk
Airport Diaries is one of two blogs that benefited from the project (the author was advised to keep it down to a post a week or people would struggle to keep up). At the time I said it was a 'strangely addictive read'. Returning for the first time since then, I discover he's now unemployed. I guess that's the end of that.
The other was Half Lived by Truman. His last entry describes the day in May 2006, when he posted his pitch to 37 agents. 22 spam comments later, he still hasn't bothered to let us know how that went.
They are sadly underwhelming. That Ms Baines is somewhere else I think.
Having a blog in the running for an award with no posts for four weeks is fairly bad.
Having one that has only had content for one month in 12 and that more than six months ago indicates a real problem with the process that has been used.
PS I do like the Shoes one. Had a show and a sock in an exhibition once. A good group exhibition. A running spike it was.
Post a Comment