The SA Blog Awards: Storm in a thimble

The “debate” about this year’s SA Blog Awards has gone from irrational to hilarious to just plain stupid. Fuelled by a tiny community of self-proclaimed experts who doubtlessly feel left out of the action, the war of words has labelled the awards as unrepresentative, elitist, exclusionist, ill-conceived and invalid. And all this over a completely opt-in or opt-out accolade, nominated by the public, with no prize money at stake.

Awards, by their very nature, begin and live on shaky ground. Who dares to judge what others are doing? Who dares to define what makes a winner and a loser? Who dares to pick the nominees?

You could say that the importance of answering these questions is inversely proportional to the size of the prize. Since the prize, from what I can best understand, is nothing other than a small GIF file, people are very uptight about these points.

For those outside the thimble of the South African blogosphere “in-crowd”, let’s start by saying what the SA Blog Awards are. They were started by Jonathan Cherry in 2005, and have run each year since then. Cherry owns a Cape Town-based marketing company called Cherryflava and is something of an “A-lister” in thimbleland. And smart too, because this positions him and his business close to the centre of the Web 2.0 journey in this country.

Ever since the founding, each year has generated a storm in a thimble. Poor Jon, you may say. Maybe that’s why it takes a little digging to find his name anywhere near the awards site. Is the marketing upside really worth being the industry punching bag?

This year’s storm — bits of which you can find via the Amatomu tag “blog awards” — is the familiar theatre of bruised egos and overrated commentators. Mostly, many people don’t seem to be able to believe that they haven’t been invited to judge these things because, after all, they are “Web 2.0 experts”.

Let’s just get one thing straight right off here: there is no such thing as a “Web 2.0 expert” in South Africa. There is no one who can stand back and proclaim pre-eminent understanding and knowledge of blogging or any other aspect of the next generation of the internet.

Partly this is because the rules are still being written. But more importantly, South Africa remains so crippled by appalling bandwidth and huge internet connection fees, along with a largely impoverished and disenfranchised population, that we do not even use the web in any meaningful way. To prance around claiming to be an “expert” when you come from one of the most underperforming internet nations in the world is not only embarrassing, but also an unforgivable conceit.

Nothing gives more evidence of this than the proliferation of inexperienced, young and arrogant personalities who expend a great deal of their time and energy writing about, speaking about and commenting on blogging and Web 2.0. A casual browse reveals “entrepreneurs” who are working out of their bedrooms in their parents’ house; kids who walked straight out of university into big-titled jobs that sound like something William Gibson would have worked into a story in 1994.

Now, I’m not against innovation or young start-ups or any of that, obviously. I walked that road myself, and I employ many of these smart, enthusiastic and passionate people. But one does have to pause and reflect on the fact that the entire Web 2.0 industry in this country consists of little more than a handful of very small companies, with experts who have gained prominence by being first-movers and little more.

The large media organisations such as the oddly renamed Avusa (Johncom), Naspers and M&G Media have, with some prodding, ventured into this new world with numerous ventures, ideas and experiments. Some — like M&G Media — have employed experienced businesspeople, technologists and academics, and, consequently, have produced some meaningful ventures (full disclosure: I blog — obviously — for Thought Leader, and I have a lot of respect for and personal ties with Vincent Maher).

Naspers has an enormous footprint in the web space thanks to 24.com and all its sub-brands, and so whatever it does is bound to succeed. It has also made a number of acquisitions, and keeps going if rumours are true.

The Times seems to have focused on creating South Africa’s first integrated multimedia newsroom, which appears to have been a moderate success. It also seems to have a number of “me too” sites either online or in development, which is fine, obviously. But again, its efforts have been small, and the results uneven.

It’s just too early to hand out the expert badges.

Which brings me to some of the rhetoric about the awards themselves. On the one hand, thimbleland is raging with people gushing about, “Oh, you really shouldn’t have,” and “Golly, what a surprise, my blog has been nominated!” Since we all know that everyone has been madly mailing and twittering and Gtalking all their friends into voting for them, this is not only hilarious but also quite humiliating. Especially as this is all so damned public.

On the other hand are reams of dull, misguided meta-critique taking apart the awards for announcing the judges late, communicating badly, giving past years’ awards to some of the organisers and so forth. Back and forth it goes, everyone giving their two cents’ worth, which, to be perfectly honest, is a little rich for me.

From what I can tell, the judging panel is actually quite excellent. It was announced late, but then again, not before the judging was to happen, so it’s hard to see why that’s such a big deal. The criteria seem fair. The categories are perhaps too numerous, with some having been removed due to low participation, but otherwise seem fine. And it does seem like efforts have been taken to make this neutral and representative.

With the participation of Charl Norman — perhaps the only person who can actually call himself an entrepreneur in this entire gemors — this thing seems to have been well thought through. And the nominees seem pretty happy; excited, even. Isn’t that enough?

In the end, as in the beginning, awards are subjective things. How that subjectivity is constructed is always going to be contentious, but you do what you can. I don’t know Jon Cherry or any of the other organisers, but as someone who participated in the digital Loeries category back when that was started, I can only commend them on what looks to be a well-organised and reasonable process within a realm that really doesn’t lend itself to one.

As a parting shot, I’d like to help define what a true “entrepreneur” is: someone who makes money from a venture which they started. An entrepreneur is not employed by a big corporate in a fancy-sounding job. In researching this piece, I have been amazed to find how this word has been bastardised by the Web 2.0 community. Also, an “expert” is not just the first person who thinks to say something on a subject.

I know it is anathema to bloggers and social networkers, but a little humbleness wouldn’t be out of place.