9/3.0/20,801

Some kind reader or readers nominated BeldarBlog in the category of "Best Conservative Blog" in Wizbang!'s 2004 Weblog Awards. I placed ninth of the fifteen blogs nominated for this category, with 3.0 percent of the 20,801 votes — almost certainly better than I deserved, given the excellence of the other nominees. Captain's Quarters was the deserving overall winner in this category. Power Line took top honors for "Best Overall Blog," and my blogospheric friend Patterico nabbed first place in "Best of the Top 100-250 Blogs"; and skimming through the other winners and nominees, I was pleased to see many other friends and residents of my own blogroll, all very deserving of recognition, praise, and regular readership.

Although this one was relatively well set up and administered, like essentially all other online polls, readers must take this exercise with many large grains (cow-licking size) of salt. WizBang!'s traffic probably comes mostly from the right hemisphere of the overall blogosphere; had, say, dKos run the contest, I rather doubt that my blog would have been noticed at all. Unlike the product of those pernicious political opinion pollsters, however, this one neither takes itself too seriously, nor threatens any distortions of any meaningful "real-life events." So all things considered, I'm mildly tickled to have been nominated, and grateful to persons on the other side of the keyboards who clicked my blog's name approximately 624 times.

With no disrespect to Wizbang! or the other fine nominees and winners, however, I'm more grateful to the folks on the other side of the keyboards who navigate, through one means or another, to my [rarely-]humble online journal itself, even during times like the last few weeks when my blogging has been embarrassingly sparse. I count myself a "winner" of sorts with each such "vote," including those who regularly visit to voice civil but disagreeing viewpoints in my comments.

I do, however, repudiate in no uncertain terms the "support" BeldarBlog receives from the small handful of miscreants who visit only to leave behind their links plugging V!agr4, p0rn0 websites, and the like. Even those "readers," however, serve a useful function in one sense — they leave me feeling righteous and powerful as I slay their spam, feeding my fantasies that I am indeed the master of my own domain[-name], ruler of all that I survey [through my TypePad interface], and a legend [in my own bandwidth].