Dave Winer Launches Scripting News Awards
Over on Scripting News, Dave Winer decided to start a series of awards for weblogs called The Scripting News Awards. This type of thing is important, if only to give people who are not running a weblog at the moment a sense that this is a large movement within the web publishing community.
There are, however, a couple of fairly obvious issues with the process defined by Dave, and the subsequent nominations for the awards. Read on for more...
In no particular order, the issues are:
- Extremely Manila Focused
One of the questions that people outside the Manila community often ask is, how much discussion of non-Manila sites actually occurs on Scripting News? Some insight might be gained from an analysis of the nominees for the Scripting News Awards. Excluding the category which is limited to Manila sites, 20 of 31 nominees (64.5 percent) are running Manila.
Of the non-Manila sites whose engines we could identify, two are Blogger, one is Post-Nuke (PHP), one is Greymatter, one is CityDesk. That leaves out a lot of web publishing platforms.
- Narrow Subject Matter
A number of sites are focused on gee-wiz technologies, or exclusive clubs to which most webloggers relate with great difficulty. Among them:
- Segway News, about the gyroscopic scooter. Live since December 1. Worthy of an annual award already?
- ICANN Weblog, not a Manila site, but, definitely for the Internet insiders.
- Davos Newbies, Lance Knobel's web site. Yes, we are capitalists. But, the new world order stuff is a little too much during the war.
- Segway News, about the gyroscopic scooter. Live since December 1. Worthy of an annual award already?
- Many Better Dead Weblogs From Which to Choose
So many sites have died in 2001 that were valuable. How could 80 percent of the "Gone But Not Forgotten Category" be Manila sites? What about:
...just to name a couple? Maybe Feed was not a Weblog, in the classic sense. But, we can come up with a number of dead weblogs that were at least as good as the ones that Dave nominated that exist outside the Weblogs or EditThisPage communities.
We are not looking for a nomination for CTDATA.com to any of these awards, although people tell us that the War On Terror coverage was particularly interesting in September and October.
What we are saying is that when we heard about the possibility of a set of annual weblog awards, we expected more diverse technological bases, and more different points of view (from a content perspective). Maybe the nomination process should have been opened up as well.