Ballot Box Stuffing Alive and Well On UK Blog Awards

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One of the delights of the internet is how many awards are out there, and invariably these are awards that need “the community” to vote on the awards to decide a winner. The obvious problem with these is that sites can leverage their readers to keep on voting for them, and thus stuffing the ballot box.

Some awards do their best to put in mechanisms to help dilute this effect… the recent European Podcast Awards had an open call for nominations, which was then whittled to a shortlist and placed in front of a large jury to decide the category winners; while the Lonely Plant Travel Blog awards looks to be using a a 50/50 mix of jury decision and internet voting.

With awards where the winner is declared by people visiting a central site and voting for the winner, it’s pretty much expected that sites will ask their readers to vote for them (and it wouldn’t surprise me if the increased page impression counts of the Award Sites bank on a lot of returns to turn a profit). There’s always been a polite line drawn between “if you like us, vote for us” and “all the other sites are rubbish, we’re the best, you must vote for us.”

The Spectator’s Coffee House blog just crossed that line.

The UK Weblog Awards is one such award, and for the “Best UK Blog 2008” the two leading sites in the voting are Melanie Phillips’s Blog at The Spectator (a single person opinion blog) and Created in Birmingham (a community blog to publicise local arts endeavours in, surprisingly, Birmingham).

Both sites ask for you to vote for them. Here’s how Created in Birmingham pitch it.

It’s a public vote and we’re up against a few of the big politicos – as I type this we’re in 2nd and a Spectator-hosted blog is winning – so any support (votes, forwarding, re-blogging, re-tweeting, etc and so on) would be gratefully received.

It was about this time last year that CiB won the MediaGuardian Award, so I’m hoping I don’t let the side down in the award-winning stakes, especially as I’m passing the reins on in a few weeks. Speaking of which, I should also say that Pete Ashton’s blog has been nominated too, and rightly so.

Quote from Created in Birmingham.

And here is The Spectator’s angle.

But all Created In Birmingham is is a community blog for arts events in Birmingham. There’s nothing special about it at all. You can’t ever imagine anyone ever going: "Wow! I really must log on this very instant to Created In Birmingham to find what abstract artists are up to in the Aston area."

Mel’s blog on the other hand, is the dog’s cojones. And I’m not saying this because I’m a Spectator writer or because I know Mel (I’ve bumped into her, what, twice maybe?). I just think it’s really annoying that a blog so courageous and frankly indispensible is in danger of being pipped to the post by a website that isn’t in the running on merit, but purely because of some heavy campaigning by a few technoliterate Brummies.

Quote from The Spectator’s Coffee House.

That’s just not cricket. To say that Created in Birmingham does not merit to be there is an insult… It has already won the Media Guardian Innovation Award; there is something special about every blog, but one that promotes the arts and culture that’s away from the mainstream is extra special; and if you need to find abstract artists in the Aston Area, then CiB is a perfect fit.

Could it be that The Spectator, suddenly up against a vibrant use of new media when they thought that, as a traditional publisher they had the award sewn up, have resorted to throwing mud? Because this blog post does read that way.

I know some of the team (both old and new) behind Created in Birmingham, and I’ve seen Melanie Phillips on Question Time. Coupled with the evidence of their respective posts about the awards… Go Brum!