Frank Barnako from marketwatch slammed the recent 2005 Business Blogging Awards by the InsideBlogging duo of Darrent Barefoot and Jeremy Wright:

Unfortunately, these awards mean nothing. There were no qualifications for nomination and no judgment from voters who are peers. It was a popularity contest. To suggest the competition’s purpose was more business development than professional development, consider that one of Wright and Barefoot’s consulting clients, eBizBlog.ca, won an award. You have to wonder: why didn’t all of them?

Steve Rubel isn’t bothered that he didn’t win but gives a nod to Barnako for the note of confidence:

… to be honest, I don’t pay a lot of attention to these awards - there’s just too darn many of them. I think all bloggers are important, even a blog with two readers.

Here’s my opinion: the primary beneficiaries of awards like this are the people/website that runs the contest. It’s more traffic for them because those nominated will talk about it and friends of those nominated will talk about it and then the winners will put something up on their website: it’s a traffic generation game. As for awards? I’ve already written on that and interestingly Jeremy Wright commented on that post: Enough already you can’t eat awards