The results of the 2006 Weblog Awards are in. The list of 2006 Weblog Award Winners is HERE.
All of us here at TMV want to express our appreciation to everyone who voted for this site — ending in our winning the Best Centrist Blog category.
As longtime readers of this nearly-three-year-old weblog know, in past years we either had fun with almost satirical posts about being nominated in a category, or simply mentioned that we were nominated. This year for reasons readers know, we decided as a site to focus excusively on issues and events posts and not ask our readers to vote for us. Our sole focus was on working to produce hopefully-thoughtful and/or fun posts 4 U.
We were all therefore genuinely surprised to find that some blogs on the right, center and left nonetheless urged their readers to vote for us.
But even more than that — and the cobloggers on this site are keenly aware of this — we got a batch of emails from people on the right, center and left saying that even though they might not agree with every post on this site (heck: not a single WRITER on this site agrees with every post on this site) they felt that TMV was providing a valuable service by trying to link to thoughtful writers of many viewpoints, offering a virtual Hometown Buffet of the range of centrist and moderate views, and helping new writers and blogs gain new readership by linking to them when we see great stuff (which we often see).
So we don’t belittle winning the award — OR crow over it either. We know that in every election (national, school board, corporate board) people cast votes for a variety of reasons. We’re not psychics so we don’t know why each person voted the way they did (nor does any writer on the Internet…although Larry Sabato could probably give an on-the-dime analysis).
But we DO know about the MANY emails from many bloggers and readers on the right, left and center who let us know how they felt. So we’ll continue to try to offer you our best take on the issues, and, as we move into our reformat, continue linking to thoughtful writers of many viewpoints.
None of us take your votes — and your friendship, including the friendship of those who had blogs running in the same category who emailed us during the voting — lightly. Thanks again.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.