Last year there was a “Best of the Medical Bloggers” over at  Echo Journal. This year it’s at Medgaget.

These awards are fine so long as they are a way of listing out great blogs for people to read. But I think the competitive aspect of it is ridiculous.

Last year the “policy” section — the one that THCB was entered into was won by a blog called Symtym which got a massive 33% of 151 total votes. And symtym only links to other blogs and stories. It doesn’t have any original writing on it at all. Those of you who look at the sitemeters at the bottom of various health care blogs might think (correctly) that 151 votes is probably not a great sample. And you’d be right. Even the “medical blogs” category only racked up 287 votes. At that time THCB was getting about 400 daily readers. Now it gets around 700–1000.

But rather than realize that this is not a presitigous award, there are certain bloggers who shall remain nameless even if they are two of my favorite IT bloggers who are trawling for votes for the 2005 award.

So if they can trawl for votes, so can I. But I don’t want your vote for me, I just want to see if we can sway the overall tallies a little. So here’s what I’m asking you to do.

Go to the best new weblog and vote for The HealthcareITGuy http://www.medgadget.com/2005bestnew.php

Go to the best health policy weblog and vote for Healthy Policy http://medgadget.com/2005bestpolicy.php

Go to the best informatics weblog and vote for HISTalk http://medgadget.com/2005besttechnology.php

I’m just interested in seeing if I can pull a Katherine Harris….