Blog Awards

The Irish Blog Awards 2008 took place in the Alexander Hotel on the first of March.

Winners included:

* Best Popculture Blog: DZ-105 by Rick O Shea

*Best Blog from a Journalist: Present Tense by Shane Hegarty

*Best Political Blog: Irish Election

*Best Sport Blog:Arseblog

I decided to take a look at some of the winning blogs to see what they offered.

Shane Hegarty’s blog has a wide range of articles ranging from a piece about Britney Spears(‘Britney Hunting’) to Samantha Power’s interview on RTE Radio 1(When does off-the-record not mean off-the-record). Some of these pieces are quite interesting but there does seem to be a lot of filler material including pointless blogs about Lost with a video of its creator JJ Abrams talking about why he loves mystery, how much easier it is now to throw someone into an airplane jet engine and why the best scene in Jaws doesn’t have a shark in it!

I also took at the sports blog ‘ Arseblog’. Being a huge football fan I found this site to be very good and i gleefully read through some of the most recent posts. This is a very interesting blog for the average football fan.

Bebo Takeoover

The importance of social networking websites to the average internet user cannot be overlooked today as Time Warner Inc. announces that it has agreed to acquire Bebo for $850 million.

Bebo is the third biggest social networking site in the USA but is No.1 in Ireland. The main reason that these sites are being bought by these companies is online advertising. Significant profits can be made from selling advertising space.

With a price tag of $850 million it is a big wager on the power of social networking to create an audience for these advertisements but if they continue to gain users like they are doing at the minute, it could be a wise investment. Just look at News Corp. (Fox Television etc.), they bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005 and it is now estimated to be worth more than $15 billion.

Interactivity

Following last weeks lecture about linking on various news site I decided to take a different angle and look at it from a purely blogging viewpoint by reading some famous one’s such as the huffington post and Salam Pax’s “Where is Raed”.

On the huffingtonpost.com I decided to look at a popular post called “Obama’s Hollow Judgement and Empty Record” by Joseph C. Wilson. Also on this page were the related news, related blog posts and related tags which i found to be very helpful when evaluating the level of news content within each blog.

Salam Pax’s blog details his life in Iraq and discusses the war, his friends lives etc. and is a very interesting read. However the layout is confusing and dark. One thing it has (to it’s credit) is some very interesting links.