No shortlisting for me this year, it seems. Nonetheless, a quick overview:

Other than the obvious that you should vote for A Fistful of Euros in the Best European Blog category (please help them beat that rabid, paranoid psycho at The Brussels Journal – the entire category seems very much slanted in favour of nutty ex-pat Republicans this year…), some obvious observations on the pointlessness of these things:

Take, for example, the Best UK Blog category. Why the unimaginitive inclusion of the likes of Samizdata, Normblog and Harry’s Place?

OK, I’m hardly in a position to judge any of them, as I can never be bothered to read the buggers (on the few times I’ve tried they’ve been far too laden with in-jokes and tedium to bother – especially the inexplicably popular Normblog, which is only beaten in the dryness and boredom stakes by Oliver Kamm, as far as I can tell). But with blog awards that work on a voting system, why include blogs that already have umpteen thousand barkingly loyal readers every day?

These things should try to promote blogs of quality, not quantity of readers, surely? Otherwise, in real-world terms, we’d find The Sun acknowledged as Britain’s “best” publication year-in, year-out. The Best Blog category is the ultimate case in point. The Huffington Post, Instapundit, The Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin, Boing Boing.

Why bother? People who don’t even read blogs have heard of these buggers – they’re the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes of the interweb in terms of their over-exposure. Why not just head over to Technorati or the TTLB Ecosystem and save everyone the fuss of clicking a little button once a day for the next week or so?

And so, in the spirit of upping the little guy, in the UK category I opted for the rather good Unspeak on this occasion, largely because I normally vote for Slugger O’Toole for these things and Unspeak is newer and has fewer readers than that Irish lot. Johnny B nearly got it too, mind, as a blog I always intend to read more often than I actually remember to. (Glowing endorsement that, eh?)

So then, which are the blogs that I’m probably not reading but really should be? Where are the ones I’ve probably never heard of lurking? I’ve only added about 20 to my blogroll/feed reader in the last year or so – yet there’s currently something ridiculous like 7 million UK blogs, where this time last year the estimate was only 300,000 or something. Where are they all?