South African Blog Awards 2013
I just received a reminder that the registration process for the South African blog awards is now open.
Anyone who is interested can go here to register their blog.
I entered my blogs last year, but I think I’ll give it a miss this year. Last years winner wasn’t too bad, but I thought the runners-up were pretty poor quality. If you want to know why I thought that, see here.
The problem is that the “awards” are not really awards at all. It’s more like an election campaign, where the blogger who manages to run around getting the most friends and friends of friends to vote for their blog wins.
I put a little discreet announcement of the thing in the sidebar, and said that if people liked my blog, they could click on the link for vote for it. If they liked it they would, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t. But if you want to get anywhere with such things you need to put a lot of effort into campaigning, and soliciting votes in the same way that people solicit “likes” on Facebook. I don’t like it when people solicit “likes”, and I don’t like soliciting votes for blog awards. The awards say nothing at all about the quality of the blogs, but rather they are a measure of how energetically the bloggers campaigned for votes.
It’s a bit like the lead up to the election of the leader of the ANC at Mangaung last year.
There’s all the politicking, the sucking up, the wheeling and dealing. It’s not about policies, it’s about personalities.
I said last year that I’d like to see Mamphela Ramphele as president of South Africa, which would mean that she would have had to go through all that politicking and wheeling and dealing and infighting and back-stabbing to get anywhere near the top of the heap, and I doubt that that would have been to her taste. And anyone who does find it en0ugh to their taste to get to the top of the heap is unlikely to make a good leader of the country. It was easier to start a new party than to go through all that.
And so with the SA Blog Awards.
They don’t really say much about the quality of the blogs. They are rather a measure of who could sucker enougyh friends and supporters to vote for them. But if you’re willing to put the effort into campaigning, go for it.
Notes from underground 
Votes from “friends” is rigged voting. Agree with you not worth the effort.