Over at Scottish Roundup, I have written the introductory article about the Scotblogs awards. One or two people had suggested to me that it would be good for Scottish Roundup to run a blogging awards scheme, and after testing the idea out on a few bloggers it was agreed that it would be a good idea.

But it is not intended to be a glorified back-slapping extravaganza. It is to be a celebration of blogging following what has been a difficult end to the year for some Scottish blogs.

It is also intended to be a way of discovering new blogs. Without a doubt, the most difficult aspect of running Scottish Roundup is trying to find new blogs. If you are pressed for time (and who isn’t?), it is easy to keep on featuring the same blogs week after week — and Scottish Roundup fell into that trap.

This is a conscious effort to turn that tide. For that reason, self nominations are encouraged. In turn, I am hoping that this will encourage more people to nominate blogs for the regular weekly roundup.

I am still looking for two or three more panellists to help out on the awards — so please get in touch if you’re up for it. Any help on what the categories should be would be much appreciated too.

The nominations phase will end on 13 January, and voting will end on 27 January. The winners will be unveiled soon afterwards.

I hate all blogging awards except for the ones I am nominated for. That means I hate all of them (apart from James Higham’s Blogpower awards!).*

One of the biggest problems is that there are just so many of them. The ones I always saw as the most important were the Bloggies — but perhaps that is just because they are the ones I came across first. Besides, I’ve never been nominated for them, so I hate them.

It’s a bit like degrees, as we have been discussing a few posts back. There are so many blogging awards that most of them mean zilch. So it’s quite funny to see Neil Clark acting as though he is some kind of cyber-god for winning a particularly flawed poll.

The full details are over at The Wardman Wire. Because you could vote multiple times (once a day, apparently), Neil Clark encouraged his readers to vote multiple times. Nineteen times in five days, to be exact.

Then when he won he went over to his patch on Comment is free and declared a blogging revolution — hilariously — “because my views are more in tune with ordinary people than most in the blogosphere”!

The only time I had previously come across Neil Clark before was when he wrote a particularly odious piece on Comment is free about the campaign to grant asylum to Iraqi employees for British forces. It rightly drew widespread condemnation from bloggers across the spectrum. (More on the Iraqi employees campaign here.)

However, this is perfectly in tune with his views on foreigners in general, so it seems. Mr Eugenides has pointed out that (as well as being a defender of Slobodan Milošević) Neil Clark is a candidate for the British People’s Alliance, which has among its policies the following:

The British People’s Alliance is also determined to expose, to halt, and to reverse the deliberate importation of a new working class whose members understand no English except commands, know nothing about workers’ rights in this country, can be deported if they step out of line, and (since they have no affinity with any particular part of this country) can be moved around at will, so that the old working class can be told to go hang, taking with it its unions, its minimum wage, its health and safety regulations, and so forth.

The British People’s Alliance is determined to expose, to halt, and to reverse the enforced bilingualism or multilingualism that transfers economic, social, cultural and political power to a bilingual or multilingual elite, so that those who are or will be excluded are or will be the English-speaking working class, black and white.

This is supposed to be a left-wing party, but it sounds more like the language of the BNP (complete with “some of my best friends are black” statement at the end). But it just goes to show — yet again — that the difference between left and right really is negligible. After all, big government is big government, and once it controls one part of the economy then control of other parts of our lives is not far behind.

Rather than left or right, what really matters is whether you are a liberal or an authoritarian. And ballot stuffer Neil Clark certainly isn’t a liberal.

(I will expand on my views on liberalism and statism in two separate posts soon.)

* I did actually win an award today, and coincidentally it was in a post about Neil Clark.

I have to confess that Blogpower is one of those things that I have kept on hearing about, but I have never fully had the time to investigate.

James Higham is a startlingly prolific blogger. The amount of energy he puts into his activities is incredible. He often sends me emails notifying me about his latest Blogfocus or something like that. And every other blog I visit, he seems to have left a comment there!

His latest email was to tell me about the Blogpower Awards. I am not the biggest fan of blog awards — mostly because I have never been nominated for one, never mind won one! That is a joke of course.

Truth be told, I’m not a fan of awards in general. But James Higham seems like a good bloke. And despite the fact that I have not yet worked out exactly what Blogpower is, it seems like an admirable enough project. So I have decided to nominate.

There are a range of categories on the go, and at first I wasn’t sure if I would be able to nominate someone for each category. But I got one down for most, although I have probably made some kind of mistake that is offensive to my own opinions.

I don’t have a favourite blog as such. In fact, almost every blog goes through good and bad patches, and it is not easy to completely fall in love with any blog. At least, not to the point where you can say, “Blog x is head and shoulders above the rest.” Despite this, I decided to express some opinions for a change.

So get your nominations in now!

I’m usually not too keen on blog awards. In fact, I despise all of them except for the ones that I’m nominated for. In other words, I despise all of them. But Clairwil has had a brainwave. For the latest blog awards to emerge, the Metro Best of Brit Blog Awards, everybody should nominate Councillor Terry Kelly for the politics category. “Imagine the look on the judges faces!”