Ordinary Gweilo

Phil is now starting to remove dodgy votes. The effect on some of the runners has been dramatic, and I can’t say I’m totally surprised. I have been very suspicious about some of the vote counts (I’m not going to name anyone here) and the figures now look a bit more reasonable.

Phil has created a small piece of code that will allow any blog to tell its readers how many votes are required to win a particular category. I looked at mine (120 votes to win the Best Hong Kong blog) and decided that I could quite easily resist the temptation to add that to my site, but amusingly someone else with an equally pathetic number of votes did post it on their own site. If I knew what post-ironic meant, I might suggest that was an example of it.

There was another brief mention of the awards in the Technology section of the SCMP, picking up on the somewhat bizarre controversy about the difference between blogs in and about Asia and blogs written by Asians. I suppose it’s all good publicity, but I really do wonder about the people who pick arguments on these things rather than being constructive. Phil has put a lot of effort into running these awards, and no-one else had taken the initiative to do it, so basically he gets to set the rules. I am sure he is open to suggestions for improving it next time, but let’s be sensible about this.