New Award Nominations (and a decision) | Sybaritica

When I returned from Court circuit to Qikiqtarjuaq a week or so ago, I was most pleased to discover that Sybaritica had been nominated for two new awards. The first nomination came from the very excellent blogger over at In Her Chucks, whilst the second nomination was made by Julie, who writes the lovely blog, Outtakes on the Outskirts.

My first order of business is to extend my very heartfelt thanks to these two writers, both for their nominations, and for their very kind words. It really is an honor to have fellow-bloggers select one’s own poor efforts for recognition and I very heartily recommend that my readers take a look at the blogs written by these two accomplished writers…

Having said all that, however, I feel bound to offer some explanation as to why I have allowed over a week to elapse before responding to these nominations. This is not a case where I have been too busy to attend to such things, nor is laziness the cause. Rather, having had taken the necessary time to give very serious and considered thought to the issue, I have, for the reasons outlined below, decided to decline the awards… 

Both of my reasons for declining the nominations relate to the rules for acceptance. These current nominations, as with my two previous awards (and all those I have seen thus far), require that nominees must, in order to accept the awards, nominate anywhere from 5 to 15 other bloggers in turn.

For my first award, choosing 7 bloggers to nominate, as I was required to do, was not all that difficult as I was able to select the names from my blog roll, which already only contains links to blogs that I think are excellent enough to deserve recognition. My next award also required a further 7 nominations but, again, I didn’t have too much difficulty in making choices as my ‘bookmarks’ also contain links to blogs that I visit frequently and very much enjoy.

Now, however, these two latest nominations, coming so quickly on the heels of the first two, are straining my ability to make new recommendations considerably. At first, intending to accept the new awards, I began searching the net for new blogs I liked but, after a brief period, it struck me that this was really a little artificial. Even though several blogs I came across were very good, none were ones that I have followed and enjoyed for any length of time and, as such, nominating them just for the sake of making a nomination really seemed contrary to the spirit of the whole award process.

My second reason for declining these two nominations is really a function of mathematics. It occurred to me, after the first nomination, that the method of conferring many of these awards is a bit … well, generous. Without getting into a complicated analysis, the geometric progression of re-nomination has quite a bit in common with chain-letters and it is easy to see that, if 5 nominees re-nominate 5 more, and those people each nominate 5 more in turn, it doesn’t take too many ‘generations’ until the number of persons being nominated for a particular award exceeds the considerable number of all the bloggers on the Internet. Again, it now seems to me that this is a bit at odds to the whole idea of giving awards and I have been thinking that some other method might be a good idea…

Anyway… I have been very much conscious of possibly coming across as churlish, rude, or even arrogant in declining these new nominations, but I hope that my readers will accept my reasoning. I have seriously been thinking about creating a new award with different rules for nomination and acceptance and I will be considering different ideas over the next little while. I often ask my readers for comments on various posts, but this one where I would REALLY like some feedback.

Hoping to hear your thoughts…

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