This is a small thing, but it is a perfect illustration of why the public should not be allowed to vote for things, ever.

The 2008 Bloggies were announced the other day, and I may write more about them later, if I can be arsed to form some opinions on the others, but I just wanted to comment on this result.

Best photography of a weblog: I Can Has Cheezburger? (I’m not fucking linking to it.  You all know it anyway.)

Also Nominated: Smitten Kitchen, Dooce, The Sartorialist, 101 Cookbooks

Of that lot, only one of them consistently produces a reasonable range of different kinds of photography. Dooce. Who, fair enough, probably couldn’t have carried another award home. But I find it tremendously frustrating that not one single dedicated photoblog even got nominated, and most especially that the one that never fucking features any good photography, is the one that won.

If you saw most of those fucking photos without text, they’d just be yet another shitty fucking photo of someone’s mangy fucking fleabag, cluttering up the internet. With the text, some of them are occasionally funny. But they’re still shitty photos, and often not original.

I get that despite the name of the award, which would seem to me to imply a certain level of expected quality, the full explanation of it is “Photoblogs and other weblogs that regularly feature photography” . But still, why in fuck, given how popular photoblogging is and how much seriously *good* photography there is out there, must they honour what is basically a joke that has long since ceased to be novel? Surely a little fucking quality control wouldn’t be out of the question?

(FWIW: Of those five, I think The Sartorialist is probably the most deserving winner. The photography isn’t top quality, or terribly interesting simply as images, but it’s of a standard, has a clear voice, and is unquestionably what the blog is about.  Personal taste would probably have had me voting for 101 Cookbooks, but I thing The Sartorialist is the one that would have most deserved the win.)