You Know Who to Vote For

Not in the Labour leadership contest, silly. We're talking about the annual flesh fest that is Iain Dale's the Total Politics Top 100 blog poll.

As everyone who's been knocking around political blogging for a while will tell you, this poll is not without controversy. First, it doesn't matter how scrupulously democratic and rigorous the poll is, Iain's participation in the vote organised by his own company raises a fair few issues of probity. Second, previous years has seen a clear bias to conservative blogs - which is unsurprising considering it started life on Iain's blog. And lastly, for a variety of reasons Iain isn't the best liked Tory blogger on the left.

On the other hand, the poll does attract a lot of interest. Last year this humble collection of scribbles made number 12 in the left blog list and menaced the overall top 40 by being just one place outside of it. While this is gratifying from an egoistic point of view (who doesn't like being flattered?) it had the happy effect of boosting the AVPS readership and profile. Seeing as socialism is still a dirty word (despite Andy Burnham's sterling efforts, snort) it is vitally important comrade bloggers build up more of a following, especially given the fractious and angry period we're about to enter.

Here are the rules for this year:

1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and ranks them from 1 (your favourite) to 10 (your tenth favourite).
2. Your votes must be ranked from 1 to 10. Any votes which do not have rankings will not be counted.
3. You MUST include at least FIVE blogs in your list, but please list ten if you can. If you include fewer than five, your vote will not count.
4. Email your vote to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com
5. Only vote once.
6. Only blogs based in the UK, run by UK residents or based on UK politics are eligible. No blog will be excluded from voting.
7. Anonymous votes left in the comments will not count. You must give a name
8. All votes must be received by midnight on 31 July 2010. Any votes received after that date will not count.

Strangely bloggers who choose to promote this have been instructed not to list ten blogs you think readers should vote for. What a shame as I had a recommended slate handy. Never mind, comrades can get an idea who I'll be voting for from a glance at last year's post.

One last thing readers who are thinking of not participating in the poll on the grounds of it being run by Iain Dale. According to Norm's interview with Iain, the man who invented blogging thinks the philosophical thesis most important to combat is Marxism. If you want to give Iain kittens, you could do much worse than voting for a Marxist blog like, erm ... this one.