I have just voted in the 2011 TP Blog Survey.

This in principle is a commendable effort intended in part to help pull together the UK’s master-list of UK political bloggers, for anyone who’s interested.

But any lists require some sort of arbitrary categorisation (more or less logical or not). This year the TP lists of available categories are strangely limiting and old-fashioned. Options excluded are UKIP(!), any Nationalist tendencies, Liberal (we are fobb’d off with Lib Dem, absolutely not the same), and Climate Change Sceptics (even though we have Green).

Plus the voting rules yet again are cumbersome if not obscure. And the hotlink to them is not obvious.

First you have to vote for at least five bloggers. Then, for your votes to count, you must type in ‘blank’ for each of the remaining boxes! Why was blank not made a default option to save this messing about? I am sure that many would-be voters will end up not having their votes counted for this reason.

Plus you have to answer both of two questions, in effect doing the same thing twice. The point here is to try to steer people towards distinguishing between ‘group blogs’ (such as Dale & Co) and ‘individual’ blogs such as this one. If that is what they wanted, why did they not make that clear by having one category for Group Blogs and one for Individual Bloggers.

Sighs

Anyway, grit your teeth and set aside a few minutes of your languid August days to vote before 19 August when voting closes. All votes for this site are, of course, much appreciated.