I’m glad ECR and M&G scooped the Blog Awards
by Andrew Smith on 03/04/08 at 1:32 am
16 comments
The first SA Blog Awards were in 2005, and if you glance down the list of winners, notice who isn’t there. There are the now familiar names, the so-called "usual suspects", of 2Oceansvibe, Joblog, Cooksister and Cherryflava, but there isn’t a single blog that is associated with traditional media. Back in ‘05 blogs were independent, personal and low budget. Jon Cherry started the Awards to try and raise the profile of blogging in South Africa, and Obz Cafe saw a handful of bloggers pat themselves on the backs and hand out awards to each other.
In 2007 the rest of the world finally noticed. The awards were covered in the Sunday Times and my dad phoned to ask me what a blog was. Tertia appeared on Carte Blanche. Mike and Dave got paid by big business to explain what was happening. Bullard moaned that bloggers were just wannabe journalists. And traditional media rolled in to town and started setting up camp.
The 2008 winners were announced last night and East Coast Radio and Mail & Guardian cleaned up 8 of the categories, including Best Blog (Thought Leader, a M&G project), Entertainment, Humour and Group Blog (ECR Breakfast) and Website Promoting Blogging (Amatomu, also M&G).
When these winners were announced there were a few groans from the crowd, and there seemed to be a pervasive sense of, "it’s not fair!". Daryl Ilbury can tell his 100,000 radio listeners to visit his blog and vote in the awards, and how can the rest of us stand a chance?
I think it’s brilliant that they won.
A rising tide
I don’t live in Natal so I can’t confirm this, but I can almost guarantee that 100,000 people listening to East Coast radio will hear about the Blog Awards. ECR will milk their win, and today someone will log on to the internet and visit a blog for the very first time. Yes, it probably won’t be your blog, but it’s a start, and once they do stumble across your blog via a link or a search engine or a business card, they will at least understand what they’re looking at.
This has been at the heart of the Blog Awards since their inception – it’s not about elevating a single blog above the rest (which is why the prizes are never a big focus), it’s about raising the profile of blogging in general. Celebrities and international bloggers are asked to participate in the hope that they spread the word about our blogs to their audience. Big media being incorporated into the winners will bring a new wave of publicity and education, and it will trickle down to benefit all of us.
The trouble with any type of "awards" is that we see the other participants as "competitors" that we’re trying to "beat". This is true in the newspaper world because each household will usually only subscribe to one paper, and as a publisher you want it to be yours. In the blogging world a reader might subscribe to 100 blogs, and stumble across many others in daily surfing, jumping from one site to the next. We have to see the ECR blogs as a benefit to the blogosphere, rather than taking away from our traffic and winning our awards.
Moving On
There were a surprising number of people at the Awards ceremony at the UCT tennis club, but nobody from ECR, M&G or Keo. Even if the awards had been held in Durban I don’t think we would have seen Daryl Ilbury there. If 2007 was the year blogging got noticed by big media, and 2008 the year they started flexing their muscles and winning awards, 2009 will be the year they try and run the show. This year’s press coverage of the Awards will be about which media house is making the most ground in the blogging field, and within the jostling for position someone will propose that the Awards need to be run more professionally, and they’re the people to do it.
Not that it’s mine to give away, but frankly I think they can have it. Our work here is nearly done. The original bloggers want to be pioneers more than they want to be famous. Running a fancy black-tie awards ceremony with audited results and big sponsors is not their idea of fun.
If you want to make money from blogging, join a corporate. While they’re busy with that, the pioneers will be hacking away at the next big thing, piecing together something new that’s at the forefront of where society is heading.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
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Eishman
Apr 3rd, 2008
Great post. Can’t help but agree. I think as long as ‘ownership’ of the SA Bloggies, remains with those who have an interest in the broader community, there will always be space for the ‘independents’
I do disagree with your prediction that the pioneers will necessarily move on the next thing. Blogging will continue to be the a place where the small guys can have a voice.
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Apr 3rd, 2008
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matthew buckland
Apr 3rd, 2008
Thanks Andrew for the words. We would have love to have been at this one (we made last year’s), but just couldn’t make it.
I think you make some good points. The whole us vs them vibe is a 1990s, especially considering the blogosphere is an interdependent ecosystem, where media is both a source of traffic for blogs and a receiver of traffic from blogs. Ie amatomu wouldn’t exist if it wasnt for bloggers — but it is also a good source of traffic and promotion for blogs.
Andrew
Apr 3rd, 2008
@Eishman, I wasn’t suggesting that the pioneers will *stop* blogging. Rather, their work as “pioneers” is largely done as blogging is now becoming mainstream. They will keep their blogs, but their pioneering energy will be directed on to something new.
Anice Hassmi
Apr 3rd, 2008
Hi Andrew,
I am from immedia, the guys who took ECR into the blogosphere as part of an overall strategy last year. We are bummed that we couldn’t be there but as luck would have it, it was badly timed for us.
I must agree with you that Big Media entering the blogscape is not a threat, we have seen thousands of our listeners engage with us in ways that we would never have dreamed of a few years ago.
Our audience who engage our blogs are being exposed daily to sites like Amatomu, SA Blog Awards etc. I can guarantee you that some of our listeners will hop the link over to the full list of winners on sablogawards.com and discover a blog or an author they find provocative.
There is a very positive role that we believe radio can play in enlarging the universe of bloggers in South Africa and this can only be good.
I believe that 3 or 4 years from now, a Blog Award winner will have cut his teeth on blogging by being exposed to it through interacting with East Coast Radio.
It is also really interesting to see how blogging has re-invented the grizzled old veterans of radio. Darren and Daryl are radio veterans – yet they are the ones leading the charge. They are doing this because the new interface and feedback blogging gives them with their audience is something they are responding to as professionals – they love and live off the audience interaction.
That drives them to new levels of creativity – which in turn has led to better quality radio. (If you haven’t caught Darren’s call to the Zimbabwe embassy yet, do yourself a favour and check it out – it’s side-splitting).
Kagiso Media (ECR’s big media owners) have no aspirations of trying to run the show – that’s best left to others.
What I can assure you is that we are trying very hard to be good netizens and although that won’t stop our PR colleagues from throwing the spin machine into overdrive (this stuff is like red meat to them), it is not meant as a landgrab.
Yes, we can exhort our 1.7 million to vote our blogs and visit our blogs, but the bottom line is that they wont keep coming back if we are not delivering the goods to them –
and evidently they are enjoying what they find.
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Fred
Apr 3rd, 2008
Sheesh Andrew – you’re getting good at this blogging malarkey. Who knew…?
(Great article, geezer!)
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bradhutton
Apr 3rd, 2008
Nice one Andy, well put. After our discussion last night, I think we can move on to world peace. Really helpful perspective. Also great to see the ECR boys responding in such a helpful and supportive role. Wonder who gets the tree!!
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Jeanne
Apr 8th, 2008
Woo hoo – I’ve made it as a “usual suspect” – who knew?
)
Good post and a lot of interesting points raised. I particularly support the idea that SA bloggers need to stop seeing each other as “the competition”. Yes, I could have posted at the outset of the 2008 awards “JUST NOMINATE ME!”, but instead (as usual) I posted a dozen other SA blog links too and said “check out these great blogs before you nominate”. There’s far too little of that going on – mentoring of newbies by The Old Guard (or the usual suspects!). If ECR’s win raises the profile of blogging in SA, then strength to their arm!
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