Calblog

Winner of the "2004 People's Blog Award"

Results are in for the 2004 People's Blog Award.

And the winner is? ...

Little Green Footballs!

On whose authority is the winner declared? Well, on mine ... and on yours (by the time you finish this post); it is—after all—the people’s award for The People’s Blog.

What exactly are the criteria for winning the "People's Blog Award?"

Simple: The winner is based on…

1) the highest ranked nominee for Wizbang's Best Overall Blog category that

2) allows reader comments.

Under such criteria nobody can touch LGF for People's Blog of 2004.

Why are "reader comments" such a crucial component of The People's Blog? Quite simply, nothing binds a blog to its readers as the ability to directly respond to posts. This act magically transforms detached readers into active contributors; in a measure it invests them as shareholders in the blog’s publicly held ‘stock.’ The ‘give and take’ within its comments section ‘fleshes out’ the post itself—sharpens it, deepens it, betters it; it becomes more than static form, but is born of discussion in giving birth to the same. It adds so much to the total sum.

Soon after the blogosphere burst Ra^ther’s bubble with ‘memogate,’ The Wisdom of Crowds was referred to here and there in the blogosphere; it described how the many minds of the blogospheric collective trumped the single-minded (bias-blinded) mainstream media. Think of a blog with comments as containing the blogosphere itself in microcosm—containing within itself the very seeds of the powerhouse of which it is a part.

Conversely, non-comment blogs reduce each post to a climate-controlled museum piece to be viewed as statuary behind the glass, observed but never touched by accompanying reader remarks. Such readership is reduced to the abject serfdom of perpetual lurker status; they are afforded no place on the blog to become anything more than voiceless lurkers.

Comments are, of course, a two-edged sword; moderating them is the Achilles' heel of allowing them in the first place. Large blogs almost universally swear them off as completely unmanageable. How busy is LGF on any given day? That varies, but 16 posts appeared on LGF last Friday, yielding roughly 2,750 comments. The thought of moderating such a site would seem nightmarish, if even humanly possible. It takes a web wizard Lizard like LGF's Charles Johnson to craft a registration system complex enough to service his vast host of devoted 'Lizardoid minions,' while keeping the 'Morlock' hordes (aka trolls) at bay with a modicum of moderator oversight.

LGF is virtually the marriage of bulletin board and blog—a ‘people-powered’ place of which Howard Dean could only dream scream. Every day at LGF hundreds of minds wrangle with a dozen or more of the day’s most compelling, explosive events; all of this with the wonderful results of a crowd’s wisdom. Small wonder Little Green Footballs has galvanized such a dedicated society of well-earned reader-respondents.

Congrats, Charles, you mensch! (and now People’s Blogger of the Year—2004!) Mazel tov and L'Chaim! :-)

Posted by clark smith at December 13, 2004 07:48 AM | TrackBack