Like you, I find it completely staggering that Iain Dale includes himself in this awards poll. Has the man got no shame? It’s totally unBritish.

He played a different game with me; he claimed to be unaware(!) of my wish to be left out. After all, I’d only blogged about it and emailed him. Perhaps I should also have paid for a short notice in the back pages of his magazine.

Anyway, I was also constantly reminded that it was ‘just a bit of fun’… so why anyone simply HAD to be included is still a bit of a mystery.

Iain’s self-serving poll also does less to promote up-and-coming blogs and more to cement the perceived position of ‘leading’ blogs (i.e. those run by Iain and his mates).

I think you need to be careful advancing this sort of argument. Obviously the TP awards are relatively benign and I am not suggesting for a second there is a paralell here. But your argument brings to mind the situation of cricket tours of South Africa during the apartheid regime and the sort of argument advanced then. “The games are going to happen anyway, so why not make sure England has a good chance of winning by making sure our best players go?”

Note, Iain, how important you thought it – this time – to discourage other bloggers from posting their own lists of preferences. This measure of influence from bloggers ‘conducting’ the poll (i.e. linking to it) is just the tip of the iceberg, but you refused time and again to admit it.

The voting was primarily promoted by and conducted on your site – a site with an audience boasting 70% Tory voters (as revealed by a later poll). You then slapped a ‘Total Politic’ label on the results, implying that the poll was as balanced as your magazine’s coverage claims to be.

When asked to show referral data that backed up your assertions that your poll was not biased to the right, you refused. (You still have access to this data via Google Analytics, BTW. All you need is the referral data to your site and/or ‘vote now’ post(s) from the relevant time period.)

There’s also the small matter of you forcing people to be included against their wishes while insisting that it was ‘just a bit of fun’ – oh, and you refusing to acknowledge the full extent of boycott(s) on your blog or in print. Those that you did list were downplayed or misrepresented. Short version here is that you could have avoided a lot of fuss just by leaving me out of it as I asked – but, no, you had to have your way and make out that it was me being difficult when all I wanted was to be left out of it.

This year, by incorporating a LibDem and Labour site in the core endorsement/promotion, you show that you recognise the bias of previous polls… but you’re just too stubborn and pigheaded to come out and say it.
And, once again, you totally fail to recognise that you shouldn’t compete in a poll that you conduct.