So we’ve had the voting for the Total Politics Top Blogs thing which officially opened Blogosphere Navel Gazing season. Next up, it’s the Bottys – Lib Dem’s official Blog of the Year awards. If you’re not a Lib Dem you’re going to want to skip this post. Trust me on this.

One of the quirks of the Bottys is that bloggers can’t win twice. This should be fantastic for long established bloggers that haven’t yet won. These include Millennium Elephant, a much loved blog and Liberal England by Jonathan Calder – one of our most well read and highly regarded bloggers.

Of course, new blogs appear all the time that makes the competition tougher:

Jennie Rigg has shown how you can run a political blog that attracts a mainstream, non-political readership by writing in a completely unpretentious style, mixing the personal and the political. I would love to see Jennie win, because it would demonstrate that the judges can look beyond normal expectations about what a political blog should be.

Then there’s Costigan Quist, who’s been demolishing bad journalism all year by actually reading the reports that journalists don’t – with a healthy dose of humour, well written prose and smut thrown into the mix. This horse has legs.

Relative newcomer to the Lib Dem blogosphere Mark Thompson has gone from nothing to being everywhere in a matter of months. His post revealing a link between the safety of an MP’s seat and the likelihood that they would abuse their expenses showed how a blog could actually make the news, not just echo it.

There are some really nice/good/clever/funny blogs out there that don’t often get much attention that would really benefit from the boost they’d get from being short-listed or winning. Does Irfan Ahmed deserve a nod for sheer punky chutzpah, even though he’s apparently ruled himself out? What about blogs like Caron’s Musings, or Cobden’s Comments, or Cicero’s Songs, or Moments of Clarity? All of these blogs are excellent in their own way, and these are just the handful that spring to mind.

These blogs – and all the other unsung blogs that I don’t even know about – need your help. It only takes just one single nomination to be considered by the judges, so you’re better off nominating the weird and wonderful over and above the well known.

For LD bloggers who want to boost their chances now is the time to go through your archives and pull out a selection of your own best posts (NOT posts written by other bloggers!) for consideration for ‘post of the year’ and to give the judges a nice easy ride through your Best Of. I am, essentially, tagging the whole LD Blogosphere with this, because that’s the kind of evil sadist I really am. Good luck