The nominations for the 2006 Weblog Awards have begun. While a million votes have been cast in the previous three years, it seems the Awards are headed to new levels of notice and participation this year. This reflects the general uptick in the visibility of blogging overall and media coverage of the Awards.

The Awards have expanded to cover a wide range of categories, not simply the “best” blog. Categories are based on topics and visitor rankings. Some are pretty creative and they cover ground from military to LGBT and everything in between. They also include international divisions.

I think the coolest thing about the Awards is that the entire thing is also carried out on a blog. Nominations are given in the comment section for each category. Now this is something the Oscars should consider! How cool is it to see nominations and then immediately see the blogosphere’s reaction to it? Especially since you are allowed to nominate yourself. Some reactions to nominations are entertaining in their own right, and highly colorful. Hopefully it won’t get too vicious. (Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I hope it will.)

Seriously, I will be very interested to see if media coverage of all of this influences blogging trends. For me, finding the blogs I like has always been a matter of (virtual) word-of-mouth. I wonder how some sort of well-publicized recognition will affect which ones people view based on status or the content bloggers provide to court votes.

That your coporate org chart is a poor basis for designing a website is well known. Along these lines, companies also frequently underestimate how compelling content needs to be to attract an audience. A New York Times article captures the essence:

A site must have addictive content, said Vincent Flanders, a Web design consultant in the Seattle area who is the creator of Webpagesthatsuck.com, a site that analyzes why some pages do not work. “People must be willing to crawl through a sewer for it.”

“Addictive” is probably the word that creators of content ought always to keep in mind as a minimum for attracting eyes. And the typical corporate lingo, far from being addictive, hardly makes sense.

And then there is the matter of usability. Featured advice from usability guru Jacob Nielson and others:

• “Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page”
• Users should see your company’s address and a picture of its location up front
• “The most important rule in Web page design is to eliminate unnecessary design”

Great advice, and it leads us to something that this article does not quite make clear: usability and addictiveness of content are related. As the success of participatory Web-based (”Web 2.0″) applications has made clear, it is the user experience as a whole that must be addictive. Site and page structures should melt into the background in order to reveal:

1. Excellent content that induces user participation (even if the action here is as simple as the making of a sales inquiry)
2. Web-based tools that make user participation completely intuitive and hassle-free (even if the “tool” is as simple as contact information displayed on the site home page)

Championing the role of the world’s great visual media amalgamator, TiVo is expanding its digital video recording capability to include Internet downloads—proof positive that televisions and computers are becoming a single appliance offering triple-digit cable and satellite channel menus, movies on demand, and the ability to hunt up your favorite Borat clips on YouTube and Google Video.

With that kind of user-driven power, traditional commericals and promos are going to die on the vine. Who’s going to sit through an ad for Levitra or the new Ford F-150 when they can watch that cheerleader getting whacked by the leprechaun again?