I think my phrasing might have been unclear earlier – I’m Nick’s colleague at Works in Progress, but not on the blog prize and don’t have any involvement there.
1. I think that blogs fill a different purpose to many other formats you mention, but are also more feasible than writing long-form: for people who have other commitments, for writing short commentaries, for responding to topical events or stories, for publishing independent parts of a series in a way that makes each part more shareable. I’m sure you can think of many examples of each of these. I think it’s not important for them to be searchable in the same way as it is for encyclopedia entries, although that’s a bonus. YouTube videos are an alternative but they also have a different demographic audience and people who prefer to consume information in a different format, so they’re not interchangeable in that way, in my opinion.
2. Those aren’t quite the same as I suggested, which would be more like a prize for new blogs that are maintained in the longterm, or an additional prize for longterm maintenance.
3. (I’m not involved in this so don’t have any comments)
4. I think those are a different sort of problem. Prizes for open ended endeavours – such as answering an unsolved problem – don’t have a certainty of being resolved. Prizes for meeting some criteria, which involve essentially improving on existing methods, are more effective than those, as Anton Howes has written about here. But neither are the same as having a prize with the certainty that someone will win the prize out of the candidates that apply. A closer analogue of this prize is probably a competition.
I think my phrasing might have been unclear earlier – I’m Nick’s colleague at Works in Progress, but not on the blog prize and don’t have any involvement there.
1. I think that blogs fill a different purpose to many other formats you mention, but are also more feasible than writing long-form: for people who have other commitments, for writing short commentaries, for responding to topical events or stories, for publishing independent parts of a series in a way that makes each part more shareable. I’m sure you can think of many examples of each of these. I think it’s not important for them to be searchable in the same way as it is for encyclopedia entries, although that’s a bonus. YouTube videos are an alternative but they also have a different demographic audience and people who prefer to consume information in a different format, so they’re not interchangeable in that way, in my opinion.
2. Those aren’t quite the same as I suggested, which would be more like a prize for new blogs that are maintained in the longterm, or an additional prize for longterm maintenance.
3. (I’m not involved in this so don’t have any comments)
4. I think those are a different sort of problem. Prizes for open ended endeavours – such as answering an unsolved problem – don’t have a certainty of being resolved. Prizes for meeting some criteria, which involve essentially improving on existing methods, are more effective than those, as Anton Howes has written about here. But neither are the same as having a prize with the certainty that someone will win the prize out of the candidates that apply. A closer analogue of this prize is probably a competition.