Where is the Best Atheist Blog Category? January 7, 2009

Where is the Best Atheist Blog Category?

By Guest Contributor
January 7, 2009

The nominees for the 2008 Weblog Awards have been listed and you can vote for some fine websites all over the place.

But among the list of categories, I don’t see an important one: Best Atheist Blog.

I’m not just saying that out of self-interest. There are tons that deserve recognition and I suspect there are as many atheist blogs out there as there are blogs in many other categories.

There already is a Best Religious Blog category, but even if we want to be extremely broad in how we define that word, there are no atheists in that bunch.

I’m not claiming there’s some anti-atheist bias or anything. Maybe just someone unaware of all that is out there on the Interwebs. (Hell, even Reddit acknowledges us.)

If anyone knows how to fix this for next year, please let us know.

(Thanks to Diane for the link!)

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What Are Your Thoughts?leave a comment
  • Aj

    The science category has Pharyngula, Bad Astronomy, and Neurologica, which is good enough for me.

  • Unfortunately, Watt’s Up With That has an edge over Pharyngula. We need to make sure that Pharyngula wins (or at least that Watt’s Up With That does not win).

    You can vote once per day (well, most of us, that is).

  • ubi dubius

    Science and atheism are not interchangeable. I don’t think the science category is a substitute. If there wasn’t a “Best Religious” category, the exclusion of the Atheist category wouldn’t be a problem.

    BTW, “Diane” is Ubi Dubium.

  • Don’t mourn — organize.

    I noticed this myself, and took it upon myself to write to them and suggest that for next year they should consider adding a Best Atheist Blog category. Anybody else who’s irritated by this, you might do the same. If they get enough emails, maybe it’ll make a dent.

  • Mriana

    Maybe we ought to create a “best atheist” blog catagory.

  • Ubi Dubium

    OK, I vote for Hemant. Oh, and Greta Christina. And Ebonmuse. And…

    Sheesh. Too many. I’ll be writing the awards site to second Greta Christina on adding the category.

  • I think it is an anti-atheist bias at work. If you look at the categories, and the nominees in them, it seems clear they are run by non-rational people. The religious and pseudo-scientific leanings are pretty blatant.

  • C’mon people, read how websites get on the list:

    For The 2008 Weblog Awards open and public nominations in 48 categories began on November 3, 2008. Voting for selected finalists is expected begin in early December 2008.

    Gotta start back during the nominating period…

    And this from their FAQ at their message board:
    Q: I nominated XXX, but don’t see them as a finalist. Why is XXX not included?

    A: Several thousand blogs were nominated. Of the hundreds nominated in each category there’s at most 10 up for voting in most categories.

    I had volunteers looking at one (or more) categories each. They didn’t know which category they would be assigned. Their directions were to look through the nominees and make two lists of 10. Their top ten and a bubble ten. They were allowed to add suggestions, but those had to be marked with stars. I was free to take all, some, or none of their suggestions. I took all those lists, validated them against the category requirements, and in some cases added and removed sites based on my knowledge of each category. The amount of data available to work with consisted of the nominations, some good regionalized blogrolls (on some of the nominees blogs), and the TTLB ecosystem snapshot (for ecosystem based categories). The guideline that blogs would appear in only one category made the process much harder.

  • Epistaxis

    If they had an award for the best of each religion, and they included atheism in the list, would that be good or bad? It’s disappointing that our favorite blog doesn’t fit into their categories.

  • «bønez_brigade»

    Though not necessarily atheist blogs (or an exhaustive list), here are a few blogs that appear to be sympathetic to atheism and/or pro-science:

    Very Large Blog: Bitch Ph.D. and Pandagon

    Large Blog: The Agonist and DeSmogBlog

    Major Blog: Dark Roasted Blend and Balloon Juice.

    Up And Coming Blog: Simply Left Behind

    Individual Blogger: Majikthise

  • lynn

    There are a ton of atheists on Reddit. I’m one of them.

  • There’s a blog in the best comic blog called Jesus and Mo which looks like a Atheist blog..it’s hilarious