Business blog awards

All awards are stunts, their purpose is to raise the profile of the industry or activity being promoted.

Sometimes, they work spectacularly well - like Hollywood's academy awards. And Australian wine consumers love to see those little gold, silver and bronze markings on the bottle labels; and they display a touching faith in the mysterious judging processes involved. One of my rules in life is to be highly suspicious of any book that has won a Booker prize.

Most awards have little impact, however. That's because they don't really 'prove' anything and there is far too many of them. There are awards for everything. So much so that it is increasingly difficult to get through life without winning something or other.

The award giving process is mostly tedious mutual ego-boosting. At the recent Australian journalism awards, 'mutual' didn't often extend beyond one's colleagues. News Ltd cheered news ltd winners, the ABC cheered ABC victors and so on.

I once sat through hours of commercial radio awards and by the time we got to the best new on-air talent in provincial WA, well after midnight, I swore I would never attend such an event again.

Bob Carr, Premier of NSW, once told me that he will not hand out awards at any event that goes past 10pm. An excellent parameter. The NSW literary awards are consequently the best of these events I've ever been to. That, and the fact that the winners made very well written acceptance speeches. The Australian songwriters awards, go on well past 10pm but you get to hear some great music along the way. A great consolation.

Luckily, the newly announced business blog awards are unlikely to be plagued with anything so prosaic as a dinner.

Nevertheless, I still have enormous reservations about the merits of an exercise like this. One of the great things about blogs is that it is easy and cheap (read free) to judge for yourself. And we do judge everyday - via our blogrolls and blog reading habits. In fact, audience feedback is more immediate and measurable in blogging than in just about any other human activity.

We already have all these other ways of measuring blog success (including the dubious Pubsub linkrankings) do we really need some old world slightly archaic feeling exercise like 'awards'? Especially, something as clunky and clumsy as awards.