In Which I Win an Award Without Really Realizing It

Yesterday I won an award. Or so I found out when I got an email from a friend telling me I'd won the JIB "Best News\Current Events Blog" award. This was news to me. I didn't even know I was nominated. Apparently though I hadn't won the JIB award, it had been renamed to the People's Choice award after a very civil falling out between Isreallycool's Aussie Dave and the IsraelForum. That's why last year's nomination button and this year's victory button look rather different.

Then just because things weren't soap operatic enough it seems another blog put out a press release claiming they won my category and then got suspended for apparently cheating. I don't name names, not to protect the innocent, but because that blog was clearly doing what a number of blogs on IsraelForum are, which is transparently fudging the voting. Go to the archives of one or two of the blogs that always end up on top of the listings and you suddenly see their posts climbing into the 300's range (No not the Frank Miller movie about the Spartans) not a rating you ever saw on the main page.

Really I don't name names, because when you get a few people together on the internet, whether it's a BBS, a board, a chat room, a group, a forum, a bloggers associations; in no time you see explosions of petty behavior as everyone wants to be in the charge of the virtual treehouse. Consider the big boys and the Pajamas Media fallout with lizardoids flaming Ann Althouse and Dennis 'I Know Real Live Muslims!' the Peasant ranting to beat the drum. It doesn't get any better at any level.

I have no talent for promoting myself. I pretty much anti-promote myself. I don't comment much on other people's blogs. I never solicit link exchanges. I don't host things and my one email conversation with a fellow blogger recently was quite unpleasant. I don't join groups. Mainly I concentrate on putting out a single post a day, often large and long and not all that easily digestible. The fact that I have the readers I do and the incoming links I do is a bit of a minor miracle that suggests there's a higher power watching over bloggers, than google bots.

So the award is nice, though I don't for a moment believe I beat Isreallycool or Atlas Shrugs which get my monthly readership in a single day. The big blogs which usually win these things will no doubt win them next year again and ignore this year as if it never happened. For now though some of the little guys won.