If It's Nominations Time, Awards Season Must Be Coming Soon

Humans, being social animals, have an ineluctable urge to share good tidings. Of course, one man's meat is another vegan's prohibition, and there lies the rub. Tastes differ, and so we arrive at imperfect ways of deciding what is good and what is just OK.

The arbiters of cool are quick to anoint what's hot and what's not, or in Wired Magazine's words, what's wired, tired and retired. Blogcritics recently added a Tastes section, with articles on Masala Chocolates, Thai dinners, and Italian Design. The Internet is a particularly fecund source of best-of lists, and worst-of ones too. Stay tuned for the yearly cavalcade coming soon to a blog near you.

The end of the year is traditionally a time to announce nominations - cultural artifacts like films, music, and books garner all the publicity, leaving other human achievements like gene sequencing and M&A deals in the dust. From The Departed to No Direction Home, 2006 has been as creatively productive a year as any in recent memory. Outside the pale of creativity as we generally use the term, the world of business saw the rise of backdating of options, the food industry dealt with contamination, and the BRICs experienced giddy rates of GDP growth.

Success, however, is only as good as the last accolade, and the rest is silence. The classic Wallace Stevens poem springs to mind(Let Be Be Finale of Seem/ The Only Emperor Is The Emperor of Ice cream), and thus gives us pause to remember that it's no big deal to be nominated or win awards after all.

That being said, Desicritics was honored to be nominated to the Best Asian Blog category at the Web Log Awards 2006, the world's largest blog competition, with over 1 million votes cast in the last three years for nearly 1,000 blogs. The Blogcritics network picked up four nominations in all, with Blogcritics.org being nominated for Best Online Community, Blogcritics Music in for Best Music Blog, and Blogcritics Sports being entered for Best Sports Blog.

The competition is fierce and fine, ranging from luminaries such as Fark.com to one-man shows like One Man Bandwidth. At the very least, the nominees are a formidable set of RSS feeds to add to your reader. The voting is open-ended, and embraces the gerrymandered nature of online voting, allowing votes to be cast upto the 15th of December, one vote per day per computer.

Get ready with your best-of nominations, crapfests, and plans for the year ahead, and share them with us on Desicritics.