Thank you! I had no idea so much prize money was involved! Acceptance speech on Monday. Here is the final list of winners: Here are the winners of the 2nd Annual European Weblog Awards, also known as the Satin Pajamas:Most…

It is sad that you would target a reporter who lost his life while trying to report the truth to the world regarding events in his country. How did you become so cold and dead of heart that the loss of a human life has become for you the basis of “jest”? You owe his family an apology.

Many thanks for organising it, and also thanks and ‘hello’ to the people who visited my little site through here.

A few thoughts re next year. Apologies for the length, but I don’t have a blog I can post them on!

First, I agree that a pure popularity contest is not the way to do this. Forget about people just voting for their favorite or home-country sites; it doesn’t work because even the most omnivorous readers simply will not evaluate all the sites being nominated. But popularity contests are fun and engage readers and, frankly, if it’s just a jury who will give a shit? So I say mix the two, giving equal weight to the popular vote in each category as well as a panel (Senate?) of esteemed Eurobloggers. This would also help prevent ties.

Second, and far more importantly, there is in my mind a big misunderstanding about why some of us are not so interested in being lumped in with other blogs. From what I could tell – I don’t read French, etc. – most of the nominated and victorious blogs are outlets for quasi-academic discussions of meta-politics, or personal musings on a range of topics big and small. All fine and good, but over here we are trying to do something different, namely take on a second-language media that is both unreadable and so captured by commercial interests that it would probably fail Freedom House’s test for being “free.” (And believe it or not, in Hungary’s case the situation seems to be getting worse.) So while people who have checked out the site in the last few days may have mostly noticed my fondness for slightly over-the-top satire, our bigger passion is for breaking news and, to use a phrase that is unfortunately now somewhat clich?d, speaking truth to power. As a result of this work – which in one case directly led to a change of management at the largest foreign business association here – I have received numerous threats, and have even been called in by diplomats of a certain well-known superpower and encouraged to play ball. And it’s because of this that I often get emails from people containing sentences like this, which just came in a few minutes ago, and apparently unrelated to the contest: “What Budapest English-language media should have always been!”

I don’t say all this just to be a snotty bitch, but to suggest that perhaps there should be a category for those blogs that use the medium to actively attack the failures in their local media markets, rather than commenting on Tim Garten Ash’s last piece in the New York Review or what they had for lunch in their funny little corner of the continent, etc. (Not that this isn’t also interesting and good…) I would suggest calling it the “Georgy Gongadze Award for Online Muckraking” or somesuch, and suggest that it be considered a very high honor, especially if you win it after getting beheaded or run out of town.

Finally, any and all are welcome to stop by for a coffee or a fr?ccs (wine spritzer) the next time you are in Budapest – even you, Manske.

All the best,

Pest

A big thanks to all my faithful readers and to the others who found @rgumente valuable and also to the AFOE for making this happen.

Cheers,

Really warm thanks to everyone for the support. I’m genuinely flattered by the results, even though I recognize that a lot of lucky events (Crooked Timber not flexing its muscle, PA not fighting to the bitter finish, other big fish not competing) conspired to help me win. Still. I’ve been reading a lot of the nominated blogs for a long time, and was delighted to even be included in their good company.

I think something to think about for next year (if there is a next year) would be to have only bloggers vote, under the principle of “one blog, one vote.” I can imagine that this would help level the playing field a bit and would also prevent bigger blogs from simply dumping their readers on the vote, or fighting wars of attrition with each other. I don’t know. I’m sure that David doesn’t even want to hear the word “blog” for a few weeks, so I’ll be quiet. Thanks again to everyone!