History Blog Award Nominations #6

My creative process. Photo by ! – ivan – !.

Sometimes ideas just hit me. I hadn’t got a clue what to say about the Best Writing Award. I wasn’t sure how it differed from the Best Blog or Best Post awards. I suppose I could have asked, but information is the enemy of wild speculation. The answer came to me when I looked at the previous nominees. They’re all academic to some degree or other. One of the strengths of what I refuse to call the blogosphere is that there’s interaction between academics of all levels and people who are interested in the subject. There’s more to history than pinning it to pages like some parchment-winged butterfly. Really there should be recognition of the variety of writing. So I was slightly put out to discover that someone else who thinks faster than me (which doesn’t narrow it down much) has already beaten me to it and nominated Mark A. Rayner at the Skwib. The best writing, I think, should communicate a passion for the subject. Failing that I’ll settle for wry bemusement. I think the Skwib via its fiction and the Lost Power Point slides does both. I think the academic historians can sometimes, unintentionally, be a little intimidating. This isn’t an appeal to lower their game, rather instead to recognise that it isn’t just the specialists producing the interesting stuff. The Skwib does this.

The other nomination would be BibliOdyssey, which ironically is a strong contender because PK knows when not to write. I don’t think I’d bother with BibliOdyssey if it were in print. On the web it’s a different matter. The posts are bite-size and moreish. The choice of imagery and with relatively minimal comment creates a site that is fun to dip into anywhere.

In term of playing with history and the blog format, I think these two blogs are excellent examples of how blog writing differs from writing in other media.

That concludes this series of posts. I’ll reluctantly thank Ralph for insisting that I do this. I have been thinking more about what could be done with a blog and looking around the net for inspiration is always good, particularly if you have a cannot be missed deadline looming. Good luck to all the nominees. —–