Matt over at Pooflingers Anonymous informs me that Respectful Insolence⢠been nominated as a finalist in the Best Medical/Health Issues Blog category of the Weblog Awards. I have no idea who nominated me (I certainly didn’t and was unaware until the other night that I was even a finalist), but my thanks go out to you, whoever you are. As you can see from my little logo, on the sidebar, I was a finalist last year as well but didn’t win. Last year, I was in the Best New Blog Category, though, and lost big time to the political blogs. (Note how the nominees for Best Blog are, with the exception of TMZ, Post Secret (note, contains material not safe for work), and possibly Boing-Boing, all primarily political blogs.)
I can’t help but notice how many of my fellow ScienceBloggers have also been nominated. For example, The Cheerful Oncologist and one of my new regular reads Flea (not a ScienceBlogger) are both finalists in the same category I am (a category that Surgeonsblog should also have been nominated for, IMHO). Also, in the Best Science Blog category we several ScienceBlogs, including Pharyngula, Deltoid, Good Math, Bad Math, Mixing Memory. I offer my best wishes to them all.
I doubt I’ll win this year, for the simple reason that this blog has evolved into something that may not be purely “medicine-y” enough for most voters. It wanders off into too many other directions, I suspect, to win. Another reason is the strange voting system for this particular award, in which voters can vote once a day during the voting period. Even with the strange voting system, I suspect the real reason that I probably won’t win is that too many voters may have seen my EneMan and Hitler Zombie posts, which are–shall we say?–a bit “out there” compared to anything I’ve seen in any of the other finalist blogs. I also suspect that my skepticism towards alternative medicine expressed in sometimes colorful terms doesn’t play well with a lot of people. Certainly, there are those out there who really, really don’t like me.
Even so, I’m just as human as the next guy (well, most of the time, anyway); so, even though I probably won’t win, I still like being nominated. If nothing else, it shows that there are a lot of people out there who like what I’m laying down here and serves as additional helium to inflate my already overinflated ego still more. (And you should have seen it after I was listed as #6 in Nature‘s Top 50 Science Blogs.) So why not? I think I’ll even add the logo to my sidebar the next time I update it, to sit right over the logo from last year reminding me that, once again, it was close, but no cigar. I’ll also put the link you can use to vote for me or the other finalists in this category RIGHT HERE.
And who knows? Maybe I’ll get to replace it with a winners logo when the voting is done.
I’m not going to hold my breath, though.
