The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web's infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities. Not long ago it announced the winners in nearly 70 categories of which 3 related to blogs.


Best business blog

Financial Times’s blog, FT Alphaville, headed by Paul Murphy, an award-winning financial journalist, is a free daily news and commentary service giving financial market professionals the information they need, when they need it. Focusing on M&A activity, fund raising and the core financial sector, including the private equity and hedge fund industries, Alphaville has three components:

• The 6.00 AM Cut, a morning briefing note published right at the beginning of the working day in the UK and Europe. Designed primarily for our readers on the move, this email service provides a quick and accessible digest of key financial news and analysis from the FT and other publications.
  

• Rolling news and commentary through the UK and European trading day posted at FT.com/alphaville. From 7.30am in London, readers get quick alerts on important breaking news, guidance on where to go for quality comment and analysis, and timely notification of crucial FT.com content. The service includes a report on activity in the rapidly evolving Credit Default Swap market, which appears on the site each day at noon, along with our daily People column, detailing key appointments each day in the financial sector.
  

• Markets Live, a real-time markets commentary service using modern messaging technology to provide near-instant views on which assets are moving, and why. This service begins daily at 11am, London time.
  

• Live prices for major stock indices, currency pairs and commodities, using data supplied by City Index, the spread-betting company. (Unfortunately, due to legal constraints, this service is not available in the US.)
  

• An innovative Index Cloud, highlighting key names in the news. Readers can click on any name to bring up a short index of relevant content.
  

• Full RSS service, compatible with all major RSS readers.
  

• Dedicated search function for Alphaville, along with the full FT.com search and quotes service.

The best cultural/personal blog

PostSecret is ranked 23rd blog at Technorati, the “official” blog ranking site. Frank Warren started the site in 2005. It is an ongoing community art project in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. The simple concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed. Since Frank Warren created the website on January 1, 2005, PostSecret has collected and displayed upwards of 2,500 original pieces of art from people across the United States and around the world.

It has several international versions: a French version of PostSecret was launched in October of 2007 under the name PostSecretFrance and in February 2008, a German version was started as PostSecret auf Deutsch. There is also one in Spanish called Los Secretos Dominicales.

Today, its visitor counter stands at 142,930,584 which marks that it is really a greatly visited site (actually in 2007 Blogger suddenly and mistakenly shut down PostSecret, as Blogger thought the blog was a 'spam blog').

Also visit http://www.postsecretcommunity.com/.


The best political blog

The Huffington Post is a privately held online newspaper, “the internet newspaper” as it is stated in their logo, was launched on May 9, 2005 as a news and commentary outlet. It is ranked one of the most linked-to blog by Technorati (actually it is number one today) and one of the most visited news weblog by Alexa.com.