Recognizing the Best Blogs of the Web

The Webby Awards have been recognizing the best sites on the web for ten years, an eternity in Internet time. After weathering the ups and downs that have affected the web world as a whole, this year's crop of nominees seems like a nice return to form, with some well-deserved recognition for sites that are doing innovative work.

Of course, our attention goes first to the blogs on the list, and this year there are three blog-related categories, for the best blogs about business, culture, and politics. We're thrilled to help power 11 of the 13 nominees, and encourage you to take a look at all of them.

With our focus on business blogging, it's especially satisfying to see smart examples of the power of business blogs such as 5 Blogs Before Lunch on TypePad, and General Motors' Fastlane blog and Inc.com, which both use Movable Type.

In the Culture/Personal category, we're fortunate enough to get to help every one of the nominees create their influential and entertaining sites. Boing Boing, Treehugger, we make money not art and popular videoblog Rocketboom are all powered by Movable Type, and show the breadth of content that blogs can cover, from activism ot geekery to pure personal expression. Of course any blog category with "personal" in the title wouldn't be complete without some cute kitten pictures, so TypePad-powered Cute Overload has stepped up to become the internet's definitive reference on fuzzy little animals with big eyes.

On the other end of the spectrum, some of the most serious content in the blogosphere comes from political blogs. All the nominees use Movable Type, but the goal is always to have things like tools and technology get out of the way and let people share their ideas -- these political blogs exemplify this potential. BAGnewsNotes and The Huffington Post both offer progressive politics in daily doses with a healthy amount of the personal voice and passion the blogosphere is famous for. And CJR Daily lets the Columbia Journalism Review focus its attentions on the media itself, with an intelligent analysis of the trends and techniques that various media outlets use to get their message across.

More than just blogs

It's not just the blog-related categories that have a lot to show us, of course. Activism nominee Feed Me Better has a news blog powered by Movable Type. Navigation nominee Phylotaxis is part of Seed Magazine's relaunch. Our friends at multiple-nominee Flickr use TypePad for their excellent blog, as does Employment nominee Monster, Financial Services nominee PayPal, Food and Beverage and LifeStyle nominee Epicurious, Guides/Ratings/Reviews nominee HybridCenter and IT Hardware/Software nominee MailChimp. On the other side of things, Technology nominees Technorati, Magazine nominees Make, News nominees Guardian, Politics nominee Mother Jones, Telecommunications nominee Wifi Net News, Travel nominee Lonely Planet, and Newspaper nominees The Village Voice and The Washington Post use Movable Type.

Of course, all of these sites really show the breadth that blogs can have, from the trivial to the profound, from cat pictures to corporate announcements. We've been fortunate enough to be recognized in the past by the Webby Academy for both Movable Type and LiveJournal, and ultimately it shows that while blogs aren't about winning awards, any opportunity to recognize good work is worth the effort.