The UK Association of Online Publishers have announced the shortlist for the AOP Online Publishing Awards 2007. As an experiment in crowdsourcing, the Online Journalism Blog is asking you to help cover the nominations by looking at one (or more) of the nominated websites and writing what you think on a wiki.

Given the intelligence of OJB readers, the result should represent a good evaluation of the candidates, and online journalism in general. Even if you only publish a one-line description of the candidate this will make a difference. This might be considered Facebook Journalism experiment #3, given that this call was sent out to the Online Journalism Blog Facebook Group (please sign up if you haven’t already).

The wiki is at http://aopawards.pbwiki.com/ – full explanations on how to use it are on there.

UPDATE: Azeem Ahmad has covered the Cross-Media category – this will be posted on the blog tomorrow.

Still persuading fellow journalists that blogs are worth the effort? Read Kristine Lowe’s ‘What journalists need to know about snowballs and fires’ and spend an hour following up the copious links:

“In the framework of my blog it works like this: I write about a company like Mecom in Norway and another blogger adds a German or Polish perspective, another tips me off about a story I might find interesting in my comment field. Or I write about a law I find worrying, another blogger picks up on the thread and asks a hard question or two, a third does an interview to clarify the situation and adds some very valuable thoughts on what impact the law might have on regimes in Africa, and another cool person analyses the law in a comment (follow-up here).”