No, we're not handing out any awards here. Like other long time denizens of the Internet, we know that most Web awards are no more than a crude swindle to coax a banner and a link out of a hard working, unsuspecting Web hobbyist. Having said that, yearend is the time for reflection over the preceding year. In 2007, we spent an inordinate amount of time reading and writing about the chess blogs, so it seems fitting to summarize that activity with one final post on the year recently ended.

We aren't the only chess fans on the planet smitten by yearend reflection. One of our favorite blogs -- although 'the site tries to be a news site more than a blog now' -- wrapped up a great year with its Annual Survey 2007. It could have been titled The Chess Year in Video (www.chessvibes.com). Especially worth watching is the Corus video of then-World Champion Kramnik discussing his win over the man who snatched the title later in the year. If you have trouble following the champ's rapidfire analysis, you can play through the game on Chessgames.com: Vladimir Kramnik vs Viswanathan Anand, Corus 2007. • Another of our favorites conducted an informal reader survey on The Biggest Chess News in 2007: both globally and in the USA (susanpolgar.blogspot.com).

Every month in 2007, we did a tour of the chess blogs (see our ChessChrono, Blog Trekking), where the first step each month was to identify ~100 posts worthy of further attention. As it happens, we always saved those intermediate lists, which lets us do a neat statistical summary on the total number of posts that caught our attention on such-and-such a blog in 2007. Here are our numbers for the top of the list:-

• 213 Susan Polgar Chess Blog
• 101 Chess Improvement by Effort [Temposchlucker]
•   88 Streatham & Brixton Chess Club
•   78 Chess Confessions
•   58 The Chess Mind
•   43 The Kenilworthian
•   43 Chess Vibes
•   37 ChessExpress
•   34 Boylston Chess Club Weblog
•   31 The Daily Dirt Chess Blog
•   27 Robert Pearson's Chess Blog
•   26 The Closet Grandmaster

It's no coincidence that these blogs are all near-permanent members on our list of Top Blogs.

As for the blogs handing out awards to each other, last year the chess blogosphere had the J’adoubies (see Blog Tripping in December, Elsewhere on the Web, 7 January 2007). This year it has the Chess Blogger Oscar Award & Acknowledgement [Rated PG]. If we could vote on the Oscar nominees, it would go to Temposchlucker. He has shown the world that you might not be a great player (although we have no idea what his chess rating is), and you might not be a great writer (although it's hard to believe he's not a native English speaker), but you can still create a great chess blog.