Jules Crittenden, Non-Participating Weblog Finalist

A number of bloggers have noted that they've been nominated as finalists in the 2008 Weblog Awards. I didn't make the cut, and actually, I wondered why. I had a great year blogging, and I'm currently ranked 94 in Wikio's December "top blog" rankings. I don't keep track of these things, in any case, and I probably would have had to nominate myself and then put up a bunch of posts asking readers to vote for me. I'm not really into all of that. Besides, I figured these contests are insiders' popularity gigs, probably not worth the time to an academic blog geek like me.

Well, it turns out Jules Crittenden proved me right. He notes that the Weblog Awards are corrupt in his post, "Best Individual Blog 2008 Finalist":

Very flattering, and thanks are in order to those of you who kindly nominated this site. However ...

... since losing to a site several years ago (that got a major assist from the DU and various GLBT sites, which is fine, but) that did not in fact meet the contest criteria of “new blog,” having existed six months ahead of the cutoff; and being informed by the awards organizer that the rules violation didn’t seem worth upsetting the applecart over, though another contestant had been ousted earlier over some unknown party’s electronic interference; I decided popularity contests that ignore their own rules are not worth participating in. Particularly when there is no money involved. I encourage you not to vote for me, or anyone else. If anyone knows of any popularity contests that do follow their own rules, please don’t nominate me there either, unless there is a big money prize, in which case I’m in.

By no means do I begrudge folks who have fun with these contests. In this case though, the deck is stacked against objectivity and fairness. Of course, some of the genuinely top blogs are nominated and win, but there's also a lot of no-name blogs listed as best blogs at the list, so these competitions do seem kind of silly.

I guess the sidebar widget is pretty impressive to readers, so what can you do?