Third Place

The polls have closed for the 2007 Weblog Awards and Jon Swift has officially been declared the third funniest blog on the Internet. DUmmie FUnnies came in second in the Funniest Blog category and Sadly, No! took the top prize in a landslide. It was the second win in a row for Sadly, No! and the beginning of a decidedly upward trend for this modest blog, which came in fourth last year.

I want to thank everyone who supported me as well as the seven blogs I shoved out of my way in my ruthless pursuit of the bronze: The Nose On Your Face, Laurie Kendrick, The Sneeze, i am bossy, Boobs, Injuries and Dr. Pepper, The Lawsons Do Dallas! and The Hatemonger's Quarterly, worthy competitors all. Please do me a favor and check out all of their fine blogs and leave them a nice compliment in their comments. I also want to heartily congratulate my friends at Sadly, No!, who won this battle fair and square, and thank them for being gracious and merciful enough to throw some votes my way toward the end, which was extremely generous of them. It's too bad for their side that their venerable vote-getting prowess is in inverse proportion to the Democrats'. And finally, I want to thank PJComix at Dummie FUnnies, just for being himself. I think he learned a valuable and important lesson from all of this, that winning isn't everything -- it's the only thing.

Now, third place often gets a bad rap. "First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado," said Alec Baldwin's character in the film Glengarry Glen Ross. "Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired." There is a perception out there that third place is for losers. But it was pointed out to me by my dear friend Kathleen Maher (whose blog Diary of a Heretic was the dark horse candidate in the Best Literature Blog category and did spectacularly well) that in horse racing third place is called "show," and according to Woody Allen, "Eighty percent of success is just showing up." And psychologists believe that coming in third is actually better than coming in second. According to a 1995 study of Olympic athletes, those who won the bronze medal were actually happier than those who won the silver. The silver medalists were frustrated they didn't win the gold, while the bronze medalists were just happy that they didn't come in fourth. And we all know about the psychological trauma Jan Brady suffered from being the Number 2 child. So my heart goes out to DUmmie FUnnies' PJComix, the Jan Brady of humor bloggers, in what must be a difficult time for him.

Some economists also believe that third place is often better than first or second place. According to James Surowiecki, sometimes as two titans battle for first place, they just end up hurting themselves. The competition between Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox for video game console supremacy, for example, has left both of them bloodied and their reputations tarnished, while the number three company, Nintendo, has actually been more profitable with Wii. Nintendo "has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived," says Surowiecki. "It made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony's game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft's reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?" I can't wait until I get my profit statement. (Ironically, Playstation 2 was advertised with a bizarre David Lynch video called "Third Place.")

In fact, third place suits this blog just fine. In Ray Oldenburg's book The Great Good Place, which I have not actually read, he says that in addition to home, which he calls the First Place, and work, the Second Place, there is The Third Place. Third places are places where members of a community gather to unwind and interact, like bars, café's, bookstores, community centers and strip joints. You might think of Sadly, No! as your home and of DUmmie FUnnies as the job you hate, but Jon Swift is The Third Place; like a friendly neighborhood bar, it's a place where everybody knows your pseudonym.

Of course, there were other blogs competing in other categories and a number of my friends, some of whom are occasional guests in the comments here, were finalists. Congratulations to all the winners, especially to the blogs on my blogroll who won their categories: Crooks & Liars for Best Video Blog, Balloon Juice for Best of the Top 250 Blogs, Tbogg for Best of the Top 251 - 500 Blogs, Woman Honor Thyself for Best of Top 501 - 1000 Blogs, Echidne of the Snakes for Best of the Top 1001 - 1750 Blogs, Creek Running North for Best of the Top 2501 - 3500 Blogs and Simply Left Behind for Best of the Top 5001 - 6750 Blogs. There were a lot of great finalists on my blogroll (congratulations to all of them, which are listed here), but I owe a special debt of gratitude for all the support I got from Whiskey Fire, Bitch Ph.D., Nourishing Obscurity, skippy the bush kangaroo, Shakesville, Susie Bright's Journal, Writers Block, Self-Styled Siren, eatbees, Three Wise Men!, Robin Slick, Michael Van Der Galien, My Left Wing, Streak's Blog, Hot Potato Mash, The Galloping Beaver, Diary of a Heretic and konagod. I don't think of us as losers; I think of us as victory challenged.

And most important of all, I want to thank Kevin Aylward, of Wizbang, and everyone who helped him out, for putting these awards together. They did a great job and showed enormous grace under pressure.

While I didn't win the coveted Weblog Award this year, I did fulfill a lifelong dream: Jon Swift made the Billboard Charts! My post "Facebook Declares War on the Blogosphere" hit Number 2 with a bullet on Billboard's Top Blog Posts Chart (see the screenshot below; click on it to make it larger). Now the name Jon Swift will be forever immortalized, along with the names of other charttoppers like that guy who wrote "Tequila."


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