Irreconcilable Musings is the official winner for last week's New Weblog Showcase: congratulations to Wally on the win!

Wally also has some excellent thoughts on the nature of the Showcase, and the effect which the alliances have had on it:

This is what I’m afraid will happen – that the New Blog Showcase will become little more than a pissing contest by proxy. Each group picks their “endorsed” post and gets their members to vote in lockstep. This significantly impacts the original intent of the contest – to introduce new blogging talent to the community.

I can assure you that I am devoting quite a bit of thought to effects like this -- and would like to hear feedback and ideas from others. Here are a few of my initial thoughts --- there's a well-written post in this somewhere, but don't have time for that today:

- I agree with Wally on the downside of alliance block-voting: among other things, it makes it probably near-impossible for non-political bloggers to win the week. That said, the upside is that the alliances have brought a significant increase in visibility to all Showcase candidates --- so while the average contestant may have a lower chance of winning, they probably get a higher guaranteed benefit of having more viewership during the contest. (Hard to measure, of course, but that's my guess).

- I find the idea of prohibiting "block voting" or "endorsements" by the alliances distasteful, because the alliance leaders should be free to say whatever they like --- and if their members choose to vote as they suggest, who am I to stop them?

- It is hard to avoid seeing parallels with real-world politics: we've just re-invented the party system for elections. We're now in a three-party state where, realistically, a candidate who does not receive support from a party probably won't be able to get elected. But, following the real-world analogy, does that mean that parties should be banned?

Anyway: where I stand right now is that I am highly unlikely to try to prohibit by force endorsements or block voting by the alliances --- but I'm equally unlikely to do absolutely nothing. I have some creative ideas that I'm considering that are half-baked at best now, but which might help mitigate the negatives of the situation without resorting to coercion and censorship.

But as I said, I'd welcome feedback!

As a final note on this week's Showcase: I am having difficulty accessing my database maintenance control panel at the moment, so I can't clean out last week's Showcase entries, but will get to that tonight...

-NZB

Update 7pm: Last weeks posts have been cleared out; let me know if you see a holdover that shouldn't be there...