Proposal for deciding the best bloggers of 2006

I noticed over at Jason Cherniak’s site the past couple of days that he’d posted a couple of lists for who he felt were the Top 10 Male Bloggers in 2006 and Top 10 Female Bloggers in 2006. Initial reactions from me are:

1. I’m flattered he’d bother to even include me in his Top 10, much less #5.
2. He has good taste for who he picked from the women side, as 4 of them are also in my required daily reading and a couple of others are ones I check fairly often.
3. To those people who ragged on him (for not including any bloggers from Quebec on the male list and having a “Liberal/Prog bias” and for supposedly demeaning the women bloggers by making a separate list in the first place) I say GROW UP!.

It’s a list of people he personally liked and his personal tastes, so he’s going to post who he feels deserve that honour. He isn’t trying to represent the whole blogosphere to the rest of the outside world who we all felt deserved a special mention. I know people like to rag on Jason any chance they get (and I certainly do from time to time ), but this is a stupid reason to do so. If you dont like his list, post your own Top 10 blogs.

That being said, it got me to thinking how the Canadian blogosphere could rank the Top 10 bloggers in a given year in some form of voting manner, and I think my idea for it would be this:

I dont like the idea of a voting once a day format, as its much to easy to “freep” the votes by blogs with motivated slavishly devoted followers. What I’d prefer is making up a panel of bloggers from a cross-section of our Canadian political blogosphere to vote on submissions - either from nominations by the general blogging community at large, or by submissions that those on the panel themselves decide to nominate (sorta like how the movies get nominated for the Oscars).

You could do the voting by having the panel rank them similar to what the baseball writers do for picking baseball’s MVP award: Rank your blogs #1 thru 10. Your #10 ranked blog would get 1 point, #9 2 points, and so forth, but your #1 ranked blog would get 15 points.

As for the panel, I would propose that it be made up of a combination of those from the different blogrolls plus some prominent unaffiliated bloggers. I realize that the Progressive Bloggers has a large cross-pollination from all the “non-Blogging Tory blogrolls”, so it would have to be decided how you’d pick from there - either pick individual bloggers from the Greens/NDP/Liberals separately and then fill in with some “progressives” that arent on any of the blogrolls other then Prog Blog, or else lump them all in and choose them from our 1 big blogroll list and pick that way. You also have the Non-Partisan Blogroll out there, and some unaffiliateds. Regardless.. I would say the panel should be no smaller then 10 and no larger then 20 of these representatives to vote on.

As for the lists, you could either have one Top 10 Bloggers list, or you could have Top 10’s for each of the male and female bloggers out there. I prefer the 2nd option myself because it allows the panel to give out more individual recognition. They could also have the “Best Blog of 2006″ overall from both lists to vote on if you wanted to have an overall recognition of 1 particular specific blog.

Thats my particular musing on this topic. I dont know how much interest it will generate, since its the weekend and New Years Eve is upon us, but hopefully it will generate some discussion here or elsewhere. I think something like this could be put together fairly quickly, if the will to do it and agreement to the concept was out there. So, I’ll throw this out there and see what we get for a reaction.