The Washington Post won the honor for best overall site in the top circulation category. (Slots in the Edgies are based on newspaper print circulation totals.) Winners in other circulation categories included The Spokesman-Review (Wash.), The Modesto (Calif.) Bee and Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World.

“‘The sheikhs told us to send five text messages to every true Muslim we knew urging them to participate,’ said a student from the Abu Nour Islamic Institute in Damascus.”

Interesting. (And thanks to Jon Garfunkel for the link.) The BBC also provides welcome perspective on the controversy.

The actual bet is: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.”

According to Kottke’s analysis, which tracked eight top-story search terms for 2005, blogs appeared higher in Google than the NYTimes.com for six of the eight terms. But when expanded to all citizen’s media versus affiliated media, the results flipped. News sites of offline media organizations appeared higher in the search results six of the eight times.

For more detail, see kottke.org

Bloggers can enter their site, and nominate other favorite blogs, at http://2006.bloggies.com/. The deadline is 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Jan. 10. A panel of judges will pick the finalists from among the most-nominated blogs and websites.

A second round of voting will be open to the public from Jan. 20 – 31, when readers may vote for winners from among the finalists in each of the 30 categories.

I leave you with what I hope will be a touch of holiday inspiration: ‘Why do I love online publishing?’, with responses from some of the year’s top Web publishers and editor. Plus me.

So allow me to wish you happy holidays until OJR returns after the New Year.

(Or, to satisfy the fans of Bill O’Reilly among us who hate the phrase ‘happy holidays,’ here’s a more detailed greeting from another, much more insightful, Fox personality:

“So, have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a crazy Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet and a solemn, dignified Ramadan. And now a word from MY God, our sponsors!”

Thank you for that, Krusty the Clown.)

Entertainment video distributed first online between January 1, 2005 and March 1, 2006 is eligible for the new Emmy Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Content for Non-Traditional Delivery Platforms.” Entry applications are due March 1, and will be available for download from www.emmyonline.tv. The winner will be announced at the annual Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony, to be broadcast on ABC in April.

Unlike last month’s decision from the Pulitzer board to open that awards competition to online-original material produced by newspapers, the television academy is not limiting its award just to broadcasters. From the Academy’s press release:

Entries for this award must be original material made-for-broadband or made-for-mobile. These platforms include video blogs, website programs including journalistic reporting, event coverage or event analysis, mobisodes (short episodics created for mobile devices), video-on-demand and other video delivered over an IP network or platform such as wireless, broadband or VOD. Entries can not be material originally produced for television viewing and then repurposed for the new media. Entries will only be accepted on DVD and must not exceed 20 minutes in length.

Awards programs play an important role in promoting great work. But with the explosion in the number of information sources now available online, the newspaper industry would better serve its long-term interests by switching its focus from promoting print journalism to promoting great journalism overall. Today’s decision takes a needed baby step in that direction. But the Pulitzers remain off-limits to online-only news organizations.

The market battle isn’t between print and online. It’s between journalism, across all media, and agenda-driven content, from astroturf propaganda to paid advertising masquerading as news. The profession as a whole would benefit from using its most prominent awards competition to support worthy efforts by those reporting news online.

The Pulitzer decision raises an additional challenge for the Online Journalism Awards, which are administered for the Online News Association by USC. The ONA originally split its awards between independent online news organizations and those affiliated with newspapers or broadcast outfits. In 2004, the ONA did away with that designation, in favor of splitting the awards by an entrant’s number of unique visitors. (I supported the switch at the time, but have since written the ONA in support of eliminating category classifications altogether.)

Since that switch, the number of entries from independent news organizations have plummeted, and the awards have become dominated by affiliated sites. If the Pulitzers are now going to consider online work as part of its awards, will the OJAs become redundant?

[Editor's note: I won't be posting tomorrow, as I'll be going in for a little medical attention. And, depending upon the quality and effectiveness of the post-op medication I get, I might not be able to work a keyboard by Friday either. We'll see.]

Here are two more we ought to add: The defense of science and the proper teaching of math.

It’s past time to lay aside the stereotype of journalists as mere literary wanna-bes, obsessed with language at the expense of arithmetic and the lab. The scientific method provides the foundation for human knowledge, and mathematics provides the universal language behind scientific method. As journalists, we’re in the same business as scientists and mathematicians – to investigate the world and describe its truths. The biggest difference is that they’ve got a longer and stronger track record of success than we do.

But we have more readers. Which makes our role in defending a replicable pursuit of the truth so important. Too many people in the United States despise science. And thanks to the indifference of too many others among the press and public, they’re getting away with dumbing down school curricula, sabotaging research and gutting public records. When we as journalists fail to do something so simple as check a source’s arithmetic, we create an opportunity for more bad data to make its way into public consciousness. We owe our readers better than that. Our profession ought to know good science, and good math, from bad and pass that knowledge on to our readers.

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve been trying for the past 10 years to teach journalists, as well as the public, better math skills. But an incident last week reminded me how far we have to go on even the simplest tasks.

My third-grade daughter brought home a math assignment involving percentages. The question offered a pie chart listing the percentage of energy provided by various sources in the U.S. and asked “How much more energy do we get from petroleum than from natural gas?”

My daughter took the easy route and tried subtraction: Petroleum’s 40% minus natural gas’ 23% equals 17%. But she looked at the pie chart, saw petroleum taking up over half again as much space, and said “That can’t be right.” She erased her figuring and wrote “About twice as much” for her answer.

My wife, taking this problem as too advanced for a third-grader, wrote a note to the teacher: “It’s not 17% more. It’s 17/23 [actually 74%] more. Not sure how to do this with 3rd grade math. She eyeballed it and said twice as much.”

A few days later, we got the assignment back. The teacher had marked the answer wrong, underlined the question, wrote “this means subtract,” noted where my daughter had erased her arithmetic, rewrote “40% – 23% = 17%” over it and added “She was right ”

Excuse me for a moment while I crawl under my desk and scream.