IrishBlog Awards
Posted on February 13, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
I’m honoured that someone has gone to the trouble of nominating this blog for two awards in the Irish Blog Awards 2007. Many thanks. I’m nominated in the Best Newcomer and Best Technology blog sections, though I don’t think of this as a technology blog in the same sense that Tom Raftery’s is (and excels at) or Keith Bohana’s. keith and Tom’s blogs are useful. This one didn’t set out to be applicable in any sense I can justify. I’m also nominated a couple of times with One Breast Less, in best group blog and best specialist blog. You can vote here.
One Breast Less has me feeling a bit uneasy about awards. It’s an account of my wife’s breast cancer and we have deliberately not gone looking for publicity for it. No link baiting, no comments at similar blogs etc. Early on in the cancer we were advised to honour her experience and the blog in part does that. We also had the ambition of breaking down the taboo around cancer, if only a little.
Roos has a very aggressive form of the disease. Obviously one of the things I can do as someone who earns half a living writing is help her structure her thoughts and experiences and make it coherent. We don’t get many visitors naturally but those who do come tend to read the whole blog, page by page.
The stats around breast cancer are very misleading. It’s not such a survivable disease as is assumed for many younger women who tend to get the more aggressive forms. Urgent action is necessary because rates of occurrence for younger women are on the increase. One thing we can do is talk about it more and raise our own consciousness of its effects. I know one of the more painful experiences for Roos is that even her own family tried to ignore what she was going through.
My technology blog by contrast is an effort that I was going to abandon soon. What I try to do here is make my rough notes for articles I might write on the impact of the digital on our culture. When I write about what really interests me my numbers have a habit of going down. I then scurry off to Techmeme, pick a subject to write about and lo, the numbers go up again. I’d tired of that and pretty much come to the conclusion that blogging is not a vehicle for trying to think out an emerging pattern of behaviour or put it another way I was talking to myself and that‘s the first sign of?.
Of the blogs I admire a few are new to me because of the awards. Sarah Carey’s is one and has a rich comments list at many of her posts. I’m embarrassed that I haven’t been there before. Tom Raftery and Donncha O’Caoimh were already known to me and great stop off places for different reasons. I also take in Conor at one of his stop-offs and Swearing Lady’s thoughts. Truth is though I don’t go scouting enough and the long list is there as a reminder. Must get out more.
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7 Responses to “IrishBlog Awards”
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I can understand your uneasiness about One Breast Less but I think it is an incredibly important blog. It strikes me that Roos and you write things which others might think but would dare not write. As a result I’m convinced you are both doing a great service to everyone in similar situations.
Oh and I was the fecker who nominated you both for Best Group Blog (and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one!).
Hadyn,
congrats on the richly deserved nominations and I’d also like to second what Conor says about One Breast Less - a far more important blog than the tech stuff I post about!
Thanks fellars for those sentiments. They mean a lot, particularly to Roos actually who is exceptionally pleased to be a nominee.
Congratulations! I’m glad they recognized you as a terrific thinker and writer.
Very kind of you Vern. Hope I make it past the long list!
Haydn,
I voted for One Breast Less, as I imagine did many others. It is a superb blog, and a worthy way to honour the experience. You both deserve great credit for it.
I’d like to respectfully suggest that perhaps you, and many other professional journalists, are too critical of your own blogging efforts? At risk of sounding obvious, if you can’t write about what really interests you on your blog, then there isn’t really much point, is there?
Why do you feel the need to keep the numbers up? Wouldn’t it be a better use of your blog if you used it to develop and encourage a smaller community of people who shared your interests and were grateful for the chance to express those interests?
To be honest, that’s the single best thing about blogging for me. Because it costs virtually nothing to publish, I don’t feel I have to justify what I write against anyone’s criteria except my own.
Hi Conn
Your making some important points there. What you might find is, as a professional journalist, I have doubts about all my work as perhaps do others, finding it a tough discipline with insufficient time to spend on the brush-up side. I think it is just the nature of the game, you feel uneasy about writing if you write. I don’t know how that plays out for bloggers. In my blogging I’m often wrestling with something that makes me uneasy or I don’t understand and the blog is my notes but yes I tkae your point. Creating a community would be great.