I’m gratified of course to be nominated for the Best Website Hugo Award, again. At the same time I’m a bit surprised about the other nominees this time. I’d have thought that SciFi.com, SF Site, and Strange Horizons were my strongest competition, whereas eFanzines is a site I’ve linked from my Links Portal page but, frankly, have not paid much attention to. I recall that 3 years ago I editorialized about the best website nominee prospects and wondered how the components of SciFi.com would be parsed. From what I heard later that year, the Hugo administrators took the nominations at face value and ended up with SciFi.com as a nominee, not its component Sci Fiction, which is the nominee this year.
As for Emerald City, Cheryl Morgan’s 3 nominations this year are a testament to her powerful presence and influence over the past two or three years. Despite her own admonition in her blog, her monthly ‘zine got nominations both as a fanzine and as a website — probably, as I noted in my commentary to the Locus Online Hugo nominations list, the first time the same content has gotten two Hugo nominations by virtue of its appearing in two different formats. James Patrick Kelly’s modest proposal for five Hugo website categories struck many people as extravagent, but something in that direction might be needed to solve counter-intuitive results such as this year’s.
