Such was the final outcome of the
2004 Koufax Awards for the Best of the Left...The lefty blogosphere, that is.
Founded by former PLA host and legal expert Dwight Meredith three years ago, and named for the legendary left-handed pitcher, Sandy Koufax, the awards were moved to their current home at Wampum when PLA sadly closed shop in 2003. Fortunately, Dwight followed his brainchild soon thereafter, and joined the Wampum lodge as cohost in time for the 2003 Awards.
The Koufax Awards are truly unique, as they are 100% "grassroots"; nominations are completely open, and last year, more than 1,000 blogs, bloggers and commentors were nominated by themselves or their readers. Voting occurs in two rounds, one person-one vote, either in comments or via email. No self-appointed committees pulling together a small platter of choices and then utilizing the latest push-button polling technology for us.
This methodology, though cumbersome (as all nomination organizing and vote-counting is done by hand,) allows the true worth of Koufax to shine; the showcasing of hundreds of blogs and posts from lesser-known bloggers. Michael Berube
remarked last month, "Well, this diffident blog didn't win any top prizes, but making the finals and picking up a couple Honorable Mentions almost doubled my daily traffic." For other winning bloggers, the Koufax Awards has been an impetus for greater things:
Digby, after taking Best Commentor in 2003, took the advice of his fans and started his own blog at
Hullabaloo, and
Amanda Marcotte, having, as Mssr. Berube put it, "hand[ed] me and James Wolcott our asses in the "best new blog" category" at
Mouse Words, was tapped by Jesse Taylor at
Pandagon, where she now runs the joint, serving up the derrieres of many a misogynist troll.
Not only did DailyKos take Best Blog, knocking out Atrios in the top spot he'd occupied the previous two years, but Best Series honors were handed out to Bill in Portland, Maine (my hometown, btw), and best commentor went to the prolific Meteor Blades. Many other Kossacks, current and alumna, were finalists in a multitude of categories as well.
But the meat of this post is not to hail the laurels of past Koufaxes, but to request support for future ones, particularly the 2005 awards, scheduled to begin in a mere six weeks from now.
The reasons the Koufax awards are open and egalitarian are also the reason why they actually cost money to run, particularly in the age of bandwidth-rich services such as Blogger and TypePad. The awards maintain their integrity if 1) the comments mechanism is reliable, as last year, we chalked up over 100,000 comments, and 2) our administrator can monitor for instances of "Freeping", or multiple votes by a single individual. In last year's awards, the outcome of two categories would have been altered had such cheating gone undetected. It was the comments concern which caused Dwight to chose to move the Koufaxes to a dedicated server, particularly after a large chunk of the comments from the first awards were permanently "eaten" by Haloscan.
Dedicated servers and fat bandwidth cost money. As all three editors of Wampum are currently rather underemployed, while we happily give our time and energy to run the awards, we are now forced to fundraise for the Awards' technical costs. Wampum began a Pledge Drive in early October, with the hope of raising the $2400 in estimated (based on actual 2004 expenses) costs well in advance. (We hope to be able to negotiate a better deal if we don't wait until the last moment.) While we were able to raise half of the costs during October, we're still almost $1200 short of our goal.
Dozens of former Koufax finalists and winners (including the charming Mainiac Bill) graciously promoted the October fundraising efforts on their own blogs. Wampum's year-round readership is a mere fraction of that during the Koufax Awards, and we would not have been as successful without that combined effort. However, in further pursuing our fundrasing goals, I've decided to not continue to rely on the kindness of our friends, but to do the actual groveling myself. As a three year member of the Kos community, I determined this was the best place to try out my new kneepads. So here goes:
Please help support this year's 2005 Koufax Awards by making a donation to Wampum (Amazon and Paypal links at the top to the page, mailing address here). As we are blatantly partisan and political, this contribution is not tax deductible, but will be put to good use strengthening bonds and fostering community within the Lefty Blogosphere.
If you are relatively new to the blogosphere and have not sampled the fruits of previous Koufax Awards, winners and finalists can be found here (2002, 2003 and 2004.)
[While it's probably too much to ask to recommend this, it will probably roll off the page so fast as to have little impact if I don't beg for that as well. And thank you to all who have mucked through this overly long appeal.]