Bloggasm

Is anybody else out there tired of the profusion of “blog awards” that are basically an excuse for traffic whoring?

Here’s how the formula works. Create a bunch of sub categories and an online polling system. Then nominate 5 to 10 blogs for each category. Then shoot emails to all the bloggers who have been nominated and let the popularity contest begin!

Seriously, some bloggers will sometimes post up to 5 links a day to the contest in order to get people to vote for them. It’s probably one of the easiest ways to create massive short-term traffic.

If people want to create a legitimate blog award, they should nominate individual blog posts — similar to the system created for the Pulitzer Prize. This way, bloggers that aren’t as well known might have a real chance at winning. This system would implement some kind of panel of jurists, and may also include poll-voting as well.

But then again, why bother when you can cause a proliferation of posts that all say “There’s less than [INSERT TIME] left before the polls close, be sure to vote for [INSERT BLOG] if you haven’t within the past 24 hours!!”

Every time one of these “Blog Awards” hits the web, the blogosphere’s legitimacy lowers by about 10 points. We like to pretend we’re serious citizen journalists, only to prove that we’re just supreme egoists.