26 February 2012

Thank you for the music: the 2011 ABBAs


The wonderful Tom Murphy at A View from the Cave compiles his ABBA's once again. ABBA stands for Aid Blogger's Best Award and is compiled on the basis of reader votes.

The prolific, insightful and funny Chris Blattman swept the awards. Development Horizons snuck in at 5th best Academic Blog. The Guardian's Global Development website was rated number one for news. Full results here.

The best bit about the ABBAs (apart from the 1970s videos) is the commentary. Tom himself describes the ABBAs as a "rather silly contest..not to be taken seriously" but the votes do raise some interesting issues.

  • why are so many of the ABBA bloggers male?
  • why are so many from the US and Europe?
The answers are probably obvious--as one Brighton based commentator notes:

"Does every development or aid blog worth mentioning have to be authored by some rich (more than likely) white (probably) middle class (very likely) academic (probably) bloke (usually), who love to share their "insights" with people who are exactly like them? Call me a cynic but...same old same old"

Ouch... the truth hurts..

P.S. There is a very nice on-line presentation from Jason Sayler at the University of East Anglia in the UK on do's and don't on development research blogs.

2 comments:

Marc F. Bellemare said...

Oh, I am white, middle-class, academic, male, and I love to share my "insights" with people exactly like me (and with those who aren't) sure enough.

That being said, I really wish "rich" also applied to me.

Congrats on the 5th position, Lawrence!

Lawrence Haddad said...

Thanks Marc, congrats to you too..... enjoyed your paper with Chris Barrett in Foreign Affairs on FPV