There is a lump in my throat, my palms are sweaty. Eyes are watering. This is extremely unusual for me to write: I don’t know what to say.

A couple days ago while checking stats I noticed some hits coming from O’Reilly and then I saw the title of the page load and my jaw dropped. Alan Graham announces the ten finalists for the Feedster Feed of the Year (FOTY) and wow, look who is on the list!

More top 10 finalists have been announced and Hmm ranked #7. Wow. Freaking wow!

Good luck to the final six blogs and congratulations to all Feed of the Year 2005 recipients. My guess for #1 is Workbench by Rogers Cadenhead.

Thank you to the judges. Thank you, Feedster for doing this. I am tremendously honored to be a top 10 finalist in this countdown contest. I especially like the the following criteria which is rare in online contests:

A panel of independent judges reviewed each 2005 Feed of the Day and rated them for uniqueness, freshness, presentation, usability, and community …. What makes this award different is that it is not a popularity contest. Most blog awards consist of nominations, reviews, and voting so naturally, the more popular blogs always rise to the top. Instead, a panel of independent judges rated blogs across a range of criteria, not just number of links or traffic.

Thank you to long time readers, new readers, and all visitors and readers. Yes, even the folks still bludgeoning me up for suggesting Nintendogs didn’t take a crap when they do (I still haven’t seen empirical screenshot evidence). I do sincerely appreciate your support and will continue working to try and make this blog worthy of your daily reading. If you believe you can make this blog better, then please register and submit your content for publishing consideration.

Guess I did find something to say, even if it took me a few days to work through these words (and I’m still not completely satisfied with them, argh). The two most important words I can think of are really all that matter and I flirted with the idea of just writing these two with the screenshot above and nothing else:

Thank you.

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