The most interesting contribution to the debate on the Bloggies so far has to be on Metafirda. She has produced a list of all the categories and ranked each of the nominees by their position on Blogdex. If the Bloggies are just a popularity contest then her theory is that she should be able to predict the winners. I did something similar last year by comparing Oscar winners with their positions on the IMDBs top 250 films.
Now of course this kind of enterprise is rife with assumptions. The first assumption is that the number of links to a site measures its current popularity. Clearly this isn’t necessarily true – links that were popular in the past but haved waned recently will get high positions. Newcomers will not. Unfortunately these figures are all we have to work with – we don’t have access to the stats of each and every site on display (and not all of the sites are comparable anyway).
Nonetheless an analysis of any differences between the results of the Bloggies and Blogdex’s rankings should help illustrate the kind of processes that are going on – they should give us a clearer idea of what it is that the Bloggies are measuring and more to the point, whether different categories are more involved than others. For example – while “Best Webring” is almost certainly going to be given to the ring that most webloggers have chosen to subscribe themselves to, “Best Tagline” will probably be voted for people judging the respective merits on the spot. I’d be really interested in seeing a comparative tally of the results with the predictions after the awards – perhaps as a combined Fairvue/Metafirda production. End