Flutterby™! : Flutterby Weblog Awards

I tried to avoid getting caught up in the whole 'blogging politics thing for a few years now, but the 'blog scene is getting stale, and we don't have a Sally Tenpenny to do any shit stirring for us, so I'm going to delve into the meta: Dave Winer has been taking a lot of crap for his Scripting News Weblog Awards. Cam did a Jonathan Franzen (for those of you who aren't book geeks, Franzen turned down an Oprah "book club" pick), in a Metafilter thread, Brig said:

all "sites i read" lists cheapen what people are doing and create a feeling of "why am i not good enough to be included?"

Which I pondered before putting up my list, and it's one of the reasons I automated my list from my bookmarks (the other option was an automated scan through the archives for "stolen from" or "via"...). Lyn has been musing on Medley about some of the heat she's taken for The Medley Medals.

So, without further ado, I open nominations in The Flutterby Personally Published Cool Sites You Might Wanna Check Out awards. And I do this with this goal: I want to find other sites that I might find interesting, and I want y'all to find other sites that you might find interesting. I could write separate scripts, but there are a bunch of technical issues with that, so just put 'em in the comments and I'll collate 'em from there. If you feel a need to remain anonymous, email me and I'll add 'em. This is also a way to absolve myself of responsibility for some of my own nominations [grin]. I offer the following categories, if you see a missing one, suggest it. Nominations will close January 1^st, at which point we'll figure out some completely arbitrary and capricious way to select the best ones. Or not, maybe the journey is the reward and we'll just list 'em all for poster(ior)ity.

The goal is to find cool sites. Feel free to nominate your own site. Any way you can figure to subvert the voting process is okay, knowing that I'm making up the rules as I go along and will feel completely free to disqualify people based on disruptions of community.

The categories are:

1. Site which should make Dan most jealous. People or sites who/which cover Flutterby topics better than Flutterby. Subcategories:
   1. Sex
   2. Drugs
   3. Technology
2. Sites we read but wish we could stay away from. Subcategories:
   1. The politics are personally abhorrent
   2. the personality sometimes makes me cringe
   3. the reader comments are so juvenile
3. Sites where the links are so compelling that the lack of personal voice doesn't matter.
4. Sites where the personal voice is so compelling that uninteresting sites or lack of links doesn't matter.
5. Sites where the content is compelling enough to override horrid design (I was going to leave this out, but Phil Wolff nominated Flutterby!).
6. Sites where the design is so compelling that the flaccid prose is unimportant.
7. Sites that started strong, petered off, and should update more often!
8. Best "I feel like an insider" source for scoops.
9. Random other cool site not covered here. Subcategories:
   1. Sex
   2. Visual Design
   3. Information Architecture
   4. Programming/Software construction
   5. Journal/Life
   6. Politics
   7. Drugs
   8. Other
10. Sites which best engender cross-weblog community.
11. Sites with the best user comments/participation.

A few categories stolen from Phil Wolff:

12. Best executive weblog: ceo's that blog. Don't be the last ceo to be nominated. I'd open this up to anyone who represents a company in their weblog.
13. Best shared weblog: more than one author posting frequently
14. Best photo rich blog: cultivate this visual segment of the community.
15. Best life passage: follow someone through childbirth, a wedding, a divorce, death, war.
16. The Can't Vote Award: best blog by someone too young to vote legally.

Reader submitted ones which will be edited in later:

And if you don't like the process or think this will unfairly single out some set of weblogs... piss off.