Friday 16 December, 2005

Controversial Blogworld (5)

With a $10,000 prize it's not surprising that the announcement of the winner of the inaugural SmartyBlog Award caused controversy this week. Certainly the shortlist included only a couple of political blogs, favoring Saab fan sites and a wine site. More surprising, however, is that one of the loudest critics of the award was one of its judges, technology commentator and blogger Charles Wright. 'We were just a touch concerned about the process which led to a site that we thought had some considerable failings, being declared the winner. As one of our regular readers, Trevor Cook, just commented: "How can a site that has no comments, no trackbacks, no feeds and has hitherto attracted no attention whatsoever in the blogosphere be considered Australia 's best blog?" ' Which begs the question: why did Wright agree to the gig? (The winning entry was Bridge Girl Traveling Diary ). A notable omission from the list of finalists was Margo Kingston's Webdiary, but it seemed that site had bigger things on its mind with Australian blog aficionados waking up on Wednesday morning to this announcement: 'G'day. Webdiary will close at midnight tonight. Thank you to everyone who contributed and helped me try to make it work. Unfortunately I couldn't get funding in time to stop me going broke, and certain events have proved to me that my skin is not thick enough to survive in this game.' Impossible to do justice here to the frenzy of comments and blogs this statement unleashed, as even many of Kingston's critics mourned the loss of a site that has attempted to establish an independent and informed media outlet. By week's end, the outpouring of support for the site meant that Webdiary would continue, albeit in a different form.

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