Conspicuous by his absence

by Henry Farrell on March 29, 2004

Forbes is the latest magazine trying to capitalize on the blogging thing by holding a “best blog competition”:http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2003/04/14/bestblogslander.html across various categories. It’s interesting to note that no less than “53%”:http://forums.prospero.com/n/mb/viewpoll.asp?webtag=fdcbiz&tid=187&lgnF=y&dlink=1&vote=6&submit=%A0Vote+%3E%3E%A0 of voters say that the best blog on the economy is “none of the above” (no other entry gets more than 11%). I imagine that the glaring absence of a certain Berkeley economics professor from the shortlist helps explain this rather peculiar outcome … (via “The Decembrist”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/03/is_this_one_of_.html)

{ 7 comments }

1

PZ Myers 03.29.04 at 10:39 pm

Who cares about economics blogs? They don’t even include a category for science or academic blogs, and they left Victor Van Hee off the medical blogs.

Screw ’em.

2

John Quiggin 03.29.04 at 11:44 pm

This is a pretty slack exercise. I’ve never heard of two of the entrants, and the link for Lynne Kiesling is six months out of date.

3

Henry 03.29.04 at 11:53 pm

Yeah, I noticed that they’d linked to Lynne’s old blogspot site too (still the best of the bunch imo).

4

daithi mac mhaolmhuaidh 03.30.04 at 1:16 am

Isn’t that feature ancient? I seem to recall Daily Kos posting about it in the last year to eighteen months.

5

John Quiggin 03.30.04 at 1:26 am

Yes, I’m pretty sure they ran something similar a year or two ago. Stephen Kirchner’s Institutional Economics site got some sort of award. It looks as if whoever is running the poll has just taken Forbes’ choices from that time and asked readers to vote on them.

6

Stephen Kirchner 03.30.04 at 4:41 am

The article and poll both went up on 20 March 2003 and the poll has stayed open since. This accounts for the out of date links and the absence of some obvious candidates, like Marginal Revolution, who weren’t around then and the high “none of the above response.”

7

Danny Yee 03.31.04 at 3:29 am

I’m rather amused that the Forbes competition page has the filename “bestblogslander” – does the winner of the best blog slander competition get a lawsuit as a prize?

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