Awards
Locus has published the results of their best Web site poll (not officially a Locus Award) (you'll have to scroll down a ways to see the results), and SH came in fourth. Not bad, especially considering that 2nd and 3rd place went to Sci Fiction and SF Weekly, respectively, which on the Hugo ballot were lumped together as scifi.com. Which brings up an interesting point: it's actually just as well that Hugo nominators lumped those two together, because otherwise they'd probably both be on the ballot separately, which would mean one of the other four that's on the ballot wouldn't have made it. Which would've been unfortunate.
(And btw, this means that SH came in second among sites that publish fiction. Interestingly, only 8 of the 19 sites listed publish fiction at all, and only 5 publish original short fiction.)
Pretty much everything you'd expect is on the Locus list, with a few surprise additions. All the Hugo nominees, for example, are there (and up at the top of the list), except for Locus Online itself, which was of course disqualified from the Locus poll. SF Site did better than I would have expected (I've never been sure how popular they are), but if you add up the first-place votes for Sci Fiction, SF Weekly, and scifi.com, it seems pretty clear to me that scifi.com taken as a whole is the frontrunner. (No way to tell for sure from the numbers given, though.) Of course, if you consider SF Site to include all the sites it hosts, and add up those numbers, SF Site comes out ahead again. This whole notion of "best site" could use some refining; too many different things it can mean, too hard to compare apples to apples. Like having a vote in which people are trying to say which is better, Asimov's or Dune (the original novel) or Buffy.
Surprises: I'm surprised to see Fantastic Metropolis so high on the list (5th place); I admit that I haven't been paying enough attention to them. I'm also a little surprised, but definitely pleased, to see some of the smaller high-quality sites show up on the list, albeit toward the end; RevolutionSF, Ansible, Speculations, and Ideomancer are certainly all worthy of recognition.
Any poll is as much a measure of its audience (and to some extent of its voting system; the Locus voting system wasn't what I was expecting, but that's my own fault for not reading up about it beforehand) as of any sort of objective quality, of course, as we can see by looking at the unofficial Hugo poll at SF Weekly, which has a one-person-one-vote system and an audience that I can't pin down. SF Weekly has 300,000 registered readers (!), making it (I think) far more widely read than any other American sf publication. Their focus is fairly heavily on media stuff, but they have odd outbreaks of literariness. And that's reflected in their poll results so far:
American Gods has twice as many votes as the next novel; my stereotyping guess would be that it's the only one of the bunch that a lot of SF Weekly readers have read. On the other hand, Perdido Street Station is (a distant) second.
In the novella category, Vinge is way out ahead; not sure what to make of that, though he's certainly popular among computer types, and it's the only story in that category that has anything to do with computers and near-future just-past-modern tech. (It occurs to me that it's interesting that the novella category has no far-future interstellar-civilization stories on it. Is the pendulum swinging away from that stuff, or were the Hugo nominators subverted by a fifth column of soft/literary sf readers?) But then in novelette, Ted's story is way out ahead, even though until recently it was available only in a relatively obscure hardcover. The same is true of the Vinge, actually; I wonder if there are a bunch of people who heard about the Fictionwise versions of those two stories but didn't know about the free online versions of all the other stories. "Undone" and "Lobsters," which seem to me to be the obvious favorites (everyone I talk to has one or the other of those at the top of their list), aren't even close.
And then in short stories, Le Guin's (available until recently only in hardcover, and still not available online) has almost as many votes as all the other candidates put together. "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," which I think is a shoo-in for the Hugo, has less than half as many votes.
Nothing terribly surprising in most of the other categories, though NYRSF is doing surprisingly well (a very distant second to Locus) in semiprozine. I'm guessing that most of the categories after the short fiction categories line up pretty well with how the awards will actually go.
SH is currently in third in the Web site category, but that's because Locus Online and SF Site are tied for second. ~Strangely enough,~ scifi.com has more than four times as many votes as all the others put together—who'd have thought that they'd do so well in a poll on their own site?
But I'm guessing that the poll only started recently, and it'll be running up through Sept. 1. So if you have any interest in it, go vote!