Best Designed Blog

Please note that there’s a new URL for annatopia, one of the nominees here and in a previous category. Now go take a lok at the other nominees and compare them directly.

BlondeSense…

Chepooka

Crooked Timber

James Wolcott

Long Story Short Pier

Por um Punhado de Pixels

Rox Populi

The Poison Kitchen

The Talent Show

Trailer Park Girl

There’s quite a range of styles there, and I found it interesting that there’s a healthy gender balance in this category, as well. And all are substantive bloggers (though admittedly, Trailer Park Girl and Nemo Nox were new to me at the outset of this contest). Several are people I tried to recruit to this blog and a pair of them I succeeded in recruiting to Open Source Politics (Patrick Taylor’s Poison Kitchen, and to American Street (Roxanne Cooper of Rox Populi). And most readers will recognize several of the best-loved political blogs in this group, old and new.

Design, like art, is in the eye of the beholder and there’s no way I can critique each without offending somebody, so I’ll let your eyes be the judge here. But I will critique the winner. The voting moved towards an older blog that’s always been pleasing to design aficionados, Kip Manley’s Long Story Short Pier and a newer blogger, our own Roxanne at Rox Populi.

With her regular title graphic changes, all very attractive, Roxanne - a freelance journalist in the alternate media and a blogger, like Kip, who can match her design excellence with her reporting and opinionating with the best of them - won this in a fairly close contest. Both deserved to win it, by my standards, so there were no vote-count irregularities to grant it to my teammate, over my state-mate. ( Update: Roxanne directs sales and marketing at AltWeeklies.com, but is not a journalist in the traditional sense.)

We extend a ‘HOO-YAW!’ and a highfive to Roxanne on her win, and believe Kip and the other contenders should be proud of the support they got that brought them this far above thousands of others. (wait… is it boo-yaw or hoo-yaw? Is my age showing? My boxer shorts aren’t.)

Walt Kelly Best Toon Blog

Named for the creator of the first champion political toon, Pogo, the nominees for this award included Abu Aardvark, Barry Deutsch whose Amptoons and other works regularly grace his Alas A Blog, the popular toonist, August J. Pollak @ xoverboard.com, Hugh Macleod, the marketing whiz who puts out gapingvoid and David Rees of get your war on.

Frankly, I was puzzled by the nomination of Abu Aardvark, a Middle East specialist, for this category, as I read him fairly often and don’t recall his tooning on display. All the others, though, are exceptional nominees with very broad followings, and the voting reflected that. One commenter noted that since Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World didn’t even get nominated, our contest was suspect. I was surprised by that as well, before the comment, though I again attribute that to my failure to get the word out to enough people and places. Yet among such talents as these, he’d still have a tough competition, in any case.

Every last one of these belongs on your blogroll. Think about the mood we’d all be in without the comic relief of toonists like these, along with the humorist bloggers. Simply put, they keep us halfway sane (which in my case is no small feat) in an age of political brutality.

One of these also, technically, is not a blogger. Yet his work was so overwhelmingly popular that the voters would not be denied. One commenter even indicated he liked this toonist’s other strip better: my new filing technique is unstoppable. Certainly. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t include his latest GYWO (It’s Guckert-esque!) or note the improbability that a toonist would have not one, not two, but four toons featured on his site. Among social commentary toonists, that’s an unheard-of feat, and it’s just another reason he emerged as a very deserving winner this year, blog or no blog.

Congratulations to David, and our thanks to all these toonists for their support of our mental health.

And that leaves just two more prizes. Which will be in my final post a little later today.