I’m in Brighton for party conference, finally with a chance to blog. Been very busy putting videos online, running training sessions and, last night, at the Blog of the Year Awards. Congratulations to all the winners, and hello to the bloggers I met for the first time.

This morning, I had phone calls with a couple of people from the BBC about the awards, giving them background information about the awards, talking them through who won, and putting them in touch with Blogger of the Year James Graham.

There’s a maxim when dealing with journalists: always assume you’re on the record. As such, when I found myself unexpectedly quoted on the BBC website, it was a pleasant surprise. Reading back what I said, though, I do think I could perhaps have been a little more erudite when praising James – so let’s assume “slag off” was me being “spikey“…

Anyway, here is a lovely photo of myself and the winners, courtesy Alex Folkes/Fishnik.com.

Once I’d heard that Best Liberal Democrat Blog to Feature a Fair Amount of Doctor Who Stuff* and Best Video Made in October 2006 Spoofing a Party Leader on a Liberal Democrat Blog weren’t going to be categories this year, I jumped at the chance to take part in the judging process for the Liberal Democrats’ Blog of the Year Awards. The shortlisting stage is now complete and you can see which blogs we’ve chosen on Liberal Democrat Voice.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony on the Sunday evening of party conference in Brighton.

*I was never going to win that with Alex and Millennium around, but I could have held out hope of a shortlisting

They come but once a year: the Bloggies, the annual weblog awards that are usually won by (probably excellent) US blogs I’ve never heard of. Still, I’ll go along and vote for my favourites. New categories for the 2007 awards include “Best Sports Weblog”, for which I will, unsurprisingly, not be making a nomination. There are, however, plenty of categories to meet all tastes.

Nominations are open until Wednesday 10th January at 2007.bloggies.com.