"Conservative Revolution" My Foot
[Edited] You may’ve noticed the ad in the sidebar for the People’s Choice Jewish Blog Awards reading: “Conservative Revolution; No leftist blog won; No support for concessions; The true Israeli public opinion.”
Yeah, sure, except for the fact that we were part of a JBlogosphere-wide boycott of IsraelForum.com’s running the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards (JIBs), initiated by Chaim at Life-of-Rubin, who was so livid about the crookedness of IsraelForum.com, that he asked the entire JBlogosphere to snub the proceedings. Dave from IsraellyCool (who founded the awards) was so uncomfortable with the voting method that he told IsraelForum.com they could no longer use the JIBs name.
We didn’t even mention them here at Jewschool, let alone encourage our readers to nominate us and vote.
You can’t claim a conservative revolution when the liberal crowd is ignoring your existence.
Though I will admit, it is a very conservative thing to do…
No leftist blog won?? Didn’t Jewschool win a bronze for best designed site?
So are there now alternative awards?
Dan,
Why make this into a conservative vs liberal issue? That has nothing to do with it. The blogs that polled well in this contest were generally ones that knew about Israel Forum for a while, encouraged their readers to vote way before any talk of a contest, or voted for themselves (and voted low for others) for a long period of time. This was part of my gripe with these awards – they were more a promotion of Israel Forum, than a promotion of Israeli and Jewish blogs (as I had envisioned).
For these reasons did I ask for these awards to be renamed, and any association with the JIBs removed. Chaim Rubin did not “get me” to do anything; I myself did not like what was going on, and decided to take action.
And by the way, I assume that the lack of a hyperlink to my blog (whereas you linked to Chaim’s) was a mere oversight, and not indicative of some anti-conservative sentiment on your part..
Wait a minute… Aussie Dave is Conservative? Dude! I thought you were Orthodox! Is Mobius possessed of anti-Conservative sentiment?? Is it because of their whacky position on Gay ordination?
I’m so confused…
The whole thing was rediculous.
Have you seen the threads Dan? I indulged in the process for a while and I when I nominated Jewschool (for the awards it “won”) and OA I got negative response flack from idiots for mentioning the sites.
TTC says it all. There isn’t a revolution here at all…just laziness. If Jewschool wanted to lead people to this site to vote for Jewschool, then Jewschool would have won more awards. Lets be honest here, Jewschool is the New York Times of the Heebosphere. It is where people go to read the Jewish news (most of the time).
You can’t claim a revolution didn’t happen if you simply quit the race. You didn’t beat the bad (or conservative guys) you just stoped fighting. Ach I say.
Uh POLJ? The voting for this award was based on 7 months of voting. Those sites that encouraged their visitors to visit IsraelForum.com over the past 7 months had a big leg up over anyone else. It’s not a big secret that IsraelForum.com has a Conservative political orientation – thus blog owners not interested in yet another unidimensional site would take a look and walk away. Their blog aggregator is pretty cool, especially since some issues have been addressed – however as a voting tool it’s wicked flawed! Ratings are based on visitor votes. Visitors can vote for a post after presumably reading it – but I’ve noticed a few things.
First of all people on the site were voting on Jewlicious posts that, based on my logs, most never read. They voted on the basis of the post’s first 53 words as displayed on the site and on their perception of Jewlicious’ ideological orientation (do we have one?). One of our posts generated over 50 votes (most quite low despite the really innocuous nature of the post) with only 2 referrers recorded from IsraelForum.com.
Secondly IsraelForum.com’s voting system seems further flawed. Every post is given an initial ranking based on some kind of criteria. All Jewlicious posts receive an initial ranking of 1 or 2 stars. Initial rankings are apparently based on criteria like size of post etc. But Jewlicious posts, regardless of size always receive 1 or 2 stars out of 5, whereas other blogs, for some odd reason, receive an initial ranking of 5 stars. Why is that? I don’t know.
What I do know is that IsraelForum.com’s voting system was severely flawed. Their award represents nothing more than a popularity contest for their site visitors. Their insistence that the awards represent a “Conservative Revolution” and the “true Israeli public opinion” is, with all due respect for the hard work done by the otherwise good folks at IsraelForum.com, uh… delusional.
I’m happy to host and help you put together a fair blog awards system. Just let me know.