The 2007 Weblog awards finalists have been announced , and of course all the usual large blogs are represented, since it's basically a popularity contest. But it got me thinking, we have such insightful posters and discerning commenters here, we should have our own awards =)

Details below the fold.

Just for fun, of course, nothing serious. I propose the following categories: foreign policy, electoral politics, economics, social issues, science, humor, and art/culture/history. I further propose two parallel contests: one for all pieces published anywhere on the web in 2007, one for content published at SC in 2007. I suggest we take nominations through November 31 and then vote in December. The long delay until voting is deliberate; it will give people a chance to post new content, or to cross-post pieces here that they wrote elsewhere so that they can be entered in the SC contest. If there are lots of entries then two rounds of voting would probably work best; the first to narrow down the nominations to finalists, the next to determine winners from the finalists in each category. Anyone with a SC account can vote, so by all means get your friends to come vote! You can definitely nominate and eventually vote for your own pieces.

Besides being fun, maybe this will also generate interest/traffic for those writers you nominate at their blogs and for SC here. I'm hoping that you'll contact those writers whose posts you are nominating and let them know you liked their work and are entering them in this contest. Keep an eye out over the next month for any pieces that you think are worthy of nomination, go back through your own posts to find the best stuff you wrote, and let's see what we can come up with!

A possible complication: I very much want this contest to represent the best of both liberal and conservative writing, but it's true that we have more liberal posters than we do conservative posters, which could skew the voting (although as mentioned previously both conservatives and liberals are welcome to get their friends to sign up and vote!). I'm open to either asking people to vote on merit rather than partisan appeal or to splitting the contest further into liberal/conservative. Most of the categories aren't overly partisan, so for now let's just assume everyone will vote on merit and keep pieces written by conservative and liberal authors together.

Format for nominations:
** Title of piece
** Category (foreign policy, electoral politics, economics, social issues, science, humor, or art/culture/history)
** Published anywhere / published on SC
** Author/username
** Link to the piece

Lemme know any suggested modifcations to the structure, and use the comments to nominate posts. Remember, you have a whole month, so there's no rush; you can come back as you recall or run across excellent posts.