Nominations for The Cliopatria Awards, 2007, in history blogging will open tomorrow, Thursday 1 November. They will remain open through the month. You'll be invited to submit nominations for the Best Individual Blog, Best Group Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Here are the winners for 2005 and 2006. The time-frame for this year's Awards is 1 December 2006 through 30 November 2007. Both Cliopatria's History Blogroll and the various history carnivals (Asian History Carnival, Biblical Studies Carnival, Carnival of Bad History, Carnivalesque, History Carnival, and Military History Carnival) are excellent sources of reference for nominations. Be sure to include both a title or name and a live link for nominations. The judges are already overworked and they'll be making their decisions during December's runup to the holiday season. The decisions will be announced in early January at the AHA convention and, shortly thereafter, here at Cliopatria.

Jeremy Young - 10/31/2007

You know, that a good point -- the instance I know of where it's been done successfully, the (now defunct) Koufax Awards, is determined strictly by a public vote, so people have to go find the comments on their own, while your judges would want to be able to look at a representative cross-section of comments.

I guess it can't be done equitably, unfortunately.

Ralph E. Luker - 10/31/2007

If I'm not mistaken, we actually have considered the possibility of doing this. The problem, which we haven't solved, is complexity. What does a nominator submit? Multiple comments from a single commenter with multiple hot links? Comments by a single commenter at multiple blogs? If a commenter does good work at multiple blogs, how can judges familiarize themselves with the context in which a comment occurs and get around to all the contexts in which the comments of all the nominees occur? I'm not sure there's a simple solution to that problem.

Jeremy Young - 10/31/2007

Not this year, but in future years, it might be nice to add a category for Best Commenter. There are some truly excellent bloggers out there who focus on responding to and improving others' work rather than on creating their own. We're all indebted to them for giving us the kind of audience every blogger dreams of -- why not honor them too?