Best Australian Blog?

I’m thinking of entering this blog in a competition.  And not just any competition. The Sydney Writers’ Centre Best Australian Blogs Competition.

Destination: denouement – a Best Australian Blog?  How terribly vain.  But I’m heartened by an award category for blogs that are less than 6 months old.  Mostly because Destination: denouement’s newness is its overriding characteristic.  All those hardened blog veterans can’t wave a virtual candle at my level of inexperience and gauche disregard for the conventions of blogging.

The main convention I’ve been flouting* is the one that the competition refers to as engagement.  The popularity-club side of blogging.  I’ve seen it at work in the world of wildly successful mummy blogs, some of which are fabulous.  Others are entirely vacuous and equally popular.  I know it has a lot to do with linking and commenting on other blogs, pushing content across platforms, and riding the fickle wave of popular attention through its erratic three-second shifts.  I understand how soc-med platforms work, but I’m just not very good at it.  Yet.

I’m just as gangly and socially awkward in soc-med circles as I was when I was trying to unravel the mysteries of teenage popularity at school.  I don’t know which was worse – that I didn’t have a clue about popularity or that I didn’t really care.  Despite this insouciance, I shot to the dizzying heights of rock-stardom years later in a library studies course.  I had all the right accessories – ninja search engine skills, smoking hot Dewey Decimal reflexes, and a brown cardigan.  I was the library studies poster child, but this popularity was effortless, not derived from any conscious effort or strategy.  

Blog engagement, on the other hand, requires consistent effort and strategy.  And time.  Whereas I have a cake-eating elephant slowing me down.  The other competition criteria are the quality of writing, and presentation and usability. 



SWC Best Australian Blogs - judging criteria

I will be entering Destination: denouement in the “words and writing” category.  There is also a People’s Choice award, which I am also (hilariously) going to enter, mostly because the irony will have me cackling on the inside for weeks.  Because I’m pretty sure that entering this category at all diminishes my already tiny likelihood of success.  But if you happen upon this post, feel free to humour me with a vote.  Even if it’s only out of appreciation for my sheer contrariness.

All of which amounts to a not very good chance in the Best Australian Blogs competition.  But there are benefits to entering anyway.  Like the possibility that someone like you might actually wander along and stop by for a read.  So I’d better get the place looking tidy and make sure I’ve got the tea and biscuits ready when you do.

*ETA:  flouting ≠ flaunting, which is what I originally wrote.  Edit, people!