JWF a Weblog Awards Finalist

Having completed nearly a year blogging, I was pleasantly surprised to find out this morning I was a finalist for Best New Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards.

Thanks to stevegg of No Runny Eggs for notifying me.

Here is a partial list of the finalists for The 2007 Weblog Awards. Finalists badges (hosted by Imageshack) will be available Thursday. Voting is scheduled to begin Thursday evening (late), but at this point we can't pinpoint the exact time polls will open. Check back Thursday afternoon for updates on poll openings.

The TTLB ecosystem categories (another 90 finalists) will be announced Thursday. If you're not a finalist there's still hope...

I'd like to thank my team of volunteers who helped look through the thousands and thousands of nominations to come up with, in my opinion, the best top to bottom slate of finalists we've ever had. Even the new categories feature strong slates. I'm really happy with the mix in the international categories and the topic area categories where we were able to get a good selection of sub-genres in a particular category. Thanks first and foremost goes to Weblog Award readers who did an excellent job nominating, but the work the my judging crew did was really outstanding thankless work. Cheers to them!

Thanks from this end go out to anyone who supported me and hopefully I can make a good showing.

I started this site on a whim last November 5 and have been pleasantly surprised as it grew, especially the past several months. Today we'll have surpassed 250,000 visits for the first year, more than I ever imagined when this started.

Having had tremendous support and links from many of the blog heavyweights out there, notably Charles Johnson of LGF, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, Don Surber, Lawhawk, Sister Toldjah, Noblesse Oblige, Jules Crittenden, Gateway Pundit and many others on my blogroll, I must thank them first and foremost for their help in getting this site some recognition.

Thanks also to others who've blogged here, including Weasel Zippers, 3 wood, RadicalRon and Just a Grunt, for their input. A major thanks also goes to all the wonderful folks I've gotten to know over the past several years at LGF as well as those who've passed along story tips and ideas.

Voting begins tonight, so let's see how it goes. Best of luck to all nominees in all the categories.