Corporate awards might seem silly, but for some entrepreneurs, they are among the few forms of recognition still within reach. And the Insider's Silicon Alley Awards, intended to "celebrate the resilience of New York's digital industry in the face of the global economic collapse," has its share of obsessives. One even wonders if the selection process has been tilted in favor of nominees with financial ties to the Insider.

Henry Blodget's publication yesterday released its final list of nominees. The nominees were selected by the Insider with input from an online poll.

As our tipster notes, the 25 finalists include Gilt Groupe, co-founded by the same team that started Silicon Alley Insider; Huffington Post, co-founded by Insider investor Ken Lerer; and Thrillist, started by Ken's son Ben Lerer.

It's hard to argue with, say, HuffPo's impact over the past year; it pioneered a particularly effective form of citizen journalism and grew both its traffic and profile by leaps and bounds. But, as with the other two nominees, its links to the Insider were not disclosed; maybe they should have been, as our tipster argues, if only to keep the awards above reproach.

Blodget, who says he "understand[s] the concern about disclosures," he since added a note to his nomination post outlining "every possible conflict I could think of." And while he conceded "there was definitely some subjectivity in the selection of the final nominees," he defended his process:

We explained up front that, while we would take the nominations and votes into account when picking the final 5 nominees, the votes would not determine our selections.

The reason we don't use straight votes in these things, by the way, is that we have learned from experience that they are too easy to game...

For what it's worth, we won't be involved in picking the winners [see explanation at bottom of this post].

For those still dissatisfied with the process, just remember: It's only an arbitrary prize. They're a dime a dozen. If you don't win SAI's, why not go for a Webby? They hand those out to practically anyone!

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Blodget explains why he voted for Spitzer in his run for governor of New York, even though he "disagreed" with the "conclusions" of Spitzer's investigation of the dotcom stock bubble. (Before he found fame as a call girl fan, Spitzer led a series of prosecutiuons against Wall Street abuses, which ended up with Blodget barred from working on Wall Street.) What Blodget said on TV:

The world needs people with that amount of chutzpah to come in and take on everybody. And so, I actually got to the point where I voted for him for Governor because I wanted to see what would happen when you took that personality and that force for change into Albany.

Blodget talks about his "respect" for Spitzer. Which is already a marked difference from what he wrote in his Silicon Alley Insider blog two weeks ago:

A year or so after the Martha Stewart trial, Eliot dropped by a Slate event before launching his run for governor. I met him in the buffet line.

ME (napkin roll in hand, flustered to suddenly find myself in the presence of my Destroyer): Hi, Eliot, Henry Blodget, good to meet you. You made my life a bit rough there for a while!

ELIOT: (3,000-watt smile): That's my job!

(Yes, he was charming. And I respected a lot of what he had done. I even voted for the bastard.)

So which is it, Henry? Do you respect Spitzer, like you told Bloomberg? Or is he your "Destroyer" and a "bastard"? Remember, Spitzer landed you in a heap of trouble the last time for just this kind of doubletalk.

See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives.

Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones.

Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry.

This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.)

There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.

CrispyGamer Must Be Running Out of Money

- If you’re not paying attention, it may seem as if the cratering economy ...
- CrispyGamer, a newish videogame site, has raised $8.25 million from J.P. Morgan’s Constellation Ventures.
- But CrispyGamer also says it has a staff of 20 people, including five full-time writers (what does everyone else do there?). That’s an awfully big staff to keep afloat on $2 CPMs–and it’s hard to imagine that CripsyGamers’s backers imagined that’s what they were getting into earlier this year.

And, if the axe does fall....

• What To Do If You Get Canned
  

• Social Media Tips For The Jobless And Looking

(Disclosure: Former Valleywag pageview champ Nicholas Carlson now blogs at a higher pay scale for Silicon Alley Insider. Good reblog, Nicholas! Now quit rewriting like you're an NPR foreign correspondent. I work in tech. If I want to meet "the murderous Muthappa Rai," I'll book a junket to visit the call center. (Photo for Wired by Scott Carney, who unlike Carlson actually went to Bangalore.)

If so, the peacemaking attempt failed. Lindzon has made no secret of his dislike for Calacanis, on his blog and on Twitter after Twitter after Twitter. In a post discussing the bailout, Lindzon gratuitously dissed Calacanis as someone who "started a bad business (Mahalo.ugh) at the top and now is scared and panicking to his e-mail list." Calacanis extended an olive branch:

Actually, we agree that value is built in the down market. There is less competition for talent, customers and market share in down markets, so it is the ideal time to start. However, many of the A/B round Web 2.0 companies are going to run out of cash before they get to the promised land, and my email newsletter was a to try and help those folks who are struggling.

Lindzon replied:

Actually, stay off my blog.

Does staying off Lindzon's blog include Silicon Alley Insider? No wonder Blodget, always eager to please, would just as soon stay out of this fight.

At present, the Business Sheet's headlines read like Rupert Murdoch had reassigned the editors of the New York Post to man the Wall Street Journal's copydesk. I trust Waxler, with whom I worked at a now-forgotten business magazine, will liven things up. Most recently, she attempted to bring a dash of celebrity to an overserious TheStreet.com. And besides working at VH1 on shows like Best Week Ever, she has comedy running in her veins: Joan Rivers is her aunt. If anyone can find the funny in a market meltdown, she can.

Specifically, NewTeeVee's Janko Roettgers recommended Indian proxy servers that all proved to be either dead or "transparent," meaning they pass your IP address along to YouTube's servers, making you easy to block. He lists a bunch of sites where he guessed video "should pop up." He guessed wrong.

SAI's Eric Krangel didn't even bother listing proxies. He just tells you to "use a proxy server through a country on YouTube's whitelist like South Korea." He also lists a few non-English streaming sites that have zero Olympics footage. Eric, next time try it yourself before you send your readers on a goose chase.

In addition, each of these writers also list a bunch of streaming sites like Veetle and pirate networks that, having been there, we can tell you are packed with nothing but NBC bootlegs. [Clarification: These clips are pre-game coverage from broadcast TV, not from nbcolympics.com, which hasn't started posting yet.]

Wired's wiki page is a shotgun blast of every possible link anyone could think of, including stale tips on watching the BBC from 2005. Like others, it sends the readers hustling to try out links that the authors clearly didn't test first. I tried every single one of the downloadable players listed there. China's Olympics channel, CCTV-5, has been removed from all.

If you want to watch soccer instead of reliving a MetaFilter thread from three years ago, the only actual end-run we've found is this live CCTV-5 stream that lets you watch in silence at 291 Kbps.

We're still looking for an end-run around for YouTube. Send us a working hack and you'll be our hero of the week. But if all you've got is a few guesses you haven't tried, send them to the reporters listed above — they clearly love that stuff.

Those sites seem inspired by the best ideas to come out of Silicon Alley Insider, Blodget's first blog effort. But they also seem a nod to Blodget's failed ambitions. Originally conceiving of Silicon Alley Insider as a look at New York's supposedly burgeoning technology scene, Blodget and his New York-based editors quickly realized there was no there there. They shifted gears to start covering large, publicly traded technology companies — most of which were based a continent away in California. (They even hired a Silicon Valley correspondent.) A wise move, but one that left their flagship publication with puzzling branding.

No matter. We do not hope Alley Insider fails, since we find the site a must-read, odd name and all. But if it does, or ends up merely a middling success, Blodget will have other publications to rely on. That talent for shapeshifting is one rarely seen in the entrepreneur-hostile realm of Manhattan.

We never touch our PC screen, and we hate it when other people touch our PC screens.... We're not particularly anal, and we polish up our Blackberry every thirty seconds or so.... So excuse us if we don't jump up and down in excitement at the thought that people are going to feel better about jabbing their fat, greasy fingers into our PC screens.

Could it possibly be because she's not happy with the numbers that ComScore is reporting for her client — or, worse, the numbers NextNewNetworks is asking her to pitch? I'd like to point out the Association for Downloadable Media is giving a presentation on video advertising standards tomorrow at Ad:tech. Maybe Hammerling should give them her support instead of taking passive-aggressive stabs at companies working in the space. That seems easier.

Then Calacanis turned away from Frommer and spotted me. A look of recognition came over his face. "I just made all that up," he told me. Was he covering a slip? Or toying with Frommer — and extending the gag to me? Or seeing if he could spread a rumor sure to drive Arrington, his TechCrunch40 conference partner, completely bonkers? Calacanis is known to invent stories just for the fun of it. I asked SAI managing editor Peter Kafka. "On the record," he told me, "we're going to take the $12 million and buy a third of TechCrunch. But don't tell anyone!"

For the record, Valleywag is seeking to raise $10 million. What? For an equity stake in this blog? Are you an idiot? Nick Denton doesn't toss around shares like that Craig Newmark twit. We're hoping someone will just give us the goddamn money and go away.