Bouquets and Raspberries

Well, five days on from our landslide victory in the 2007 Weblog awards, it's time for a few reflections. When it was announced that this blog had been nominated for the Best UK blog award, the opposition tried to disparage both me and the award's organisers. There was more than a whiff of anti-Americanism in the air- "fancy these out-of-touch Americans nominating someone like him- shows how much they know about British blogging" was the standard jibe. I also received some very nasty emails - which I did not publish- sneering at the fact that our share of the vote was, on day two, only around the 1% level. The reason our share of the vote was so low to begin with was I didn't even know about the award until the second day of the competition, when I received an email from The Exile. Seeing me trailing at the bottom, the opposition thought they'd put the boot in. In response to a pseudonymous commenter who asked the question "Neil who" on his blog, a fellow nominee wrote that I was the blogger "who wrote terrible things nobody agreed with". The blog of the nominee in question ended up polling 135 votes, mine polled over 1116. I believe the correct psychological term for the condition of the blogger in question is transference.
(I wonder incidentally what these "terrible things" are: my opposition to illegal wars of aggression, my support for renationalisation of the railways and the privatised utlities, free care for the elderly and the reintroduction of a top rate of income tax for the very rich?)
When our vote started to pick up and gain ground on the leaders, the opposition started to change their line of attack. Desperate pleas for their readers to vote tactically to stop me winning were published. The result: our lead got bigger and bigger.
If you want to read more about the gracelessness of the opposition's campaign, The Byzantine Sacred Art blog and the blog of Chris Paul go into further details.
Five days after the competition ended not a single one of the other nominees for the Best UK blog award has had the decency to email me with their congratulations.
And when a self-proclaimed liberal-left website posted a note of congratulations to me on winning the award, a nerdy warmongering cyberbully called Francis Sedgemore waded in with some of his black-shirted chums to bully the poster in question to retract the message of congratulations. (The same thing happened today on the website of Chris Paul, with the posting of some highly malicious and defamatory comments about me by "anonymous")
Faced with the landslide victory of someone who they did everything they could to smear, disparage and marginalise, not just through the campaign, but throughout the last few years, the pro-war bloggers, "free market" fanatics and 'liberal' interventionists have now decided to simply ignore the poll result altogether.

But enough of bad losers, sour grapes and graceless, wretched excuses for human beings.

The main thing is that thanks to your support, we handed out an enormous and humiliating defeat to the warmongers, the bully boys and the smear merchants. Thank you once again, to all who voted for this blog and to those blogs who supported the
campaign. Without The Exile, I would not have known about the award until it was far too late, and I'd also like to give special thanks to Svetlana of the Byzantine Sacred Art blog for her fantastic support.

What the last week demonstrated was that if we all stick together, we can achieve anything.