With a little bit of intrigue, scandal and drama about cheating and the well-known popularity issues, the 2003 Bloggie Awards are up and running. The grid with the nominations was put online a few days ago and everyone around the blogosphere is choosing their favorites in 30 categories. I wanted to write a good post about the Bloggies and I’ll try my best.

I will start by saying that when I launched the Blogrollers webring I made cheap publicity and asked to be nominated. Two years ago, when the Bloggies came up for the first time I had no idea they existed, and last year I was in the “Bah! It’s just another popularity contest” wagon. But during the last year I’ve tried to keep myself away from anything that could mine my blogger spirit and I try to participate as actively as I can in all these fun activities (memes, group logs, projects and so on); so this year I’m following the Bloggies like I follow the Oscars, the Golden Globs: out of curiosity.

I read and link the blogs I really like, I bookmark the Lords of the Blogs (Yes, Megnut, Kottke, Zeldman… all of those) to learn from their web designing skills and I don’t go for the “Who’s the coolest kid on the block” thing simply because I see too much attacking these days. I really don’t like those bloggers who have gained popularity by being mean, rude and thinking they are smart-asses using all kinds of nasty words in their posts to make fun of others; but it’s a personal position that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that their blogs are liked by others. Blogging for me is a very personal thing and this year I decided the Bloggies were a good way to know more about the Blogosphere.

There are some really cool blogs listed in the contest and although I know that for many people the voting hasn’t been fair, I prefer to take the way of “let’s enjoy what’s in there”. I remember when I was a kid, I grew up in the country side and we could do all the physical activities you can imagine; we played all kinds of sports for fun and when my friends got competitive I said “No, I don’t want to play anymore”. I mean, if something is supposed to be fun, why get all cranky because others can make it better? The same with blogs. I try to see the fun part in them and the only reason I actually asked for a nomination for Blogrollers, was because the ring is new and I thought it was good publicity; not because I wanted it to be better. The fact is, my ring is not in the nominations grid, ha ha!

I was really surprised when while checking my referrers I found a few hits from an URL that took me to an in-dept analysis of the bloggies, written by Philo, a blogger in San Francisco. When mentioning the nominations for Best Canadian Weblog, he wrote that somehow my blog had been missed and I was like “What? Thank you!”. Then I found the complete nominations list and saw “BeaLog” in there. Who nominated me? I have no idea, but thank you very much! I mean, my blog barely gets less than 150 hits a day and my babbling gets confusing sometimes. Not to mention that most of the hits come from search engines looking for “Beatriz” because we have to admit it, my name is not very common in the WWW. And I realized that somehow we all are looking for some kind of recognition, it feels good, but there is no need to feel bitter about it. If I have 5 people who come in regular basis that makes me happy; no need for a Bloggie.

Bottom line: the Bloggies are supposed to be fun and I’m enjoying them. Maybe because I’m not into all this competition mood or thinking how I can make others trip and fall. I entered my votes today and if you want to see who I voted for, just click here (the page was made to test my skills as a webmaster. It validates HTML perfectly, ha ha ha!).