It’s that time of year again, Baltimore. The time when we bother you as much as we possibly can without completely alienating you so that you’ll vote for us in the Baltimore Sun’s Maryland’s Outstanding Blogs contest. Voting begins at 8 am today, and runs through November 10. Vote for the Chop daily. Pretty please.

We’re feeling the pressure this year. No longer are we the new kid on the block, the scrappy young contender with something to prove. After winning last year in the Best Music and Nightlife category, as well as taking home the Best Local Blog award from the City Paper this year we’re ready to put our championship belt on the line against all challengers.

The Chopfish: Much like Huey Long, We've got a strong record and the readers' best interest at heart, but we're not above grandstanding and politicking.

This year we’re up for Best Entertainment Blog, Best Lifestyle Blog, and Best Out On The Town Blog. We’d like to win any one of these categories, Although Best Out On The Town blog may be the most fitting for us this year.

By the way: The Mobbies does not count as pageviews in the Baltimore Sun’s paywall scheme, so you can feel free to vote for us every single day with no worries about getting shut out of the site.

Paywall notwithstanding, the Mobbies will always have kind of a soft spot in our heart and bookmarks. It was the first Mobbies that introduced us to most of the blogs to which we subscribe today, and that made us think “Gee, you know what? This blogging thing doesn’t seem so difficult. Maybe we should start a blog.” And so we did. And we set out to make it one of the best around. We set out to make it the type of blog we would want to read every day.

So we’re asking for your vote. Not because we want to win a popularity contest on Twitter and Facebook (although we’re not above that) but because we work hard on this blog, and we’re proud of it. What have we done for you lately? Let’s see…

• The new URL. We bought thebaltimorechop.com for several years. We’re not going away anytime soon.
• The new design. It took a lot of time and a bit of cash to bring the blog up to the next level. Little did we know that getting it installed was only a fraction of the work. It took days of technical nonsense to make all the content fit properly. (We’re still working on the subscription issues.)
• We’re still ad free/spam free. We could have switched on google ads a month ago and started counting coin. But we didn’t. You know why? Because google ads are annoying. If and when we do introduce advertising to this site, it’ll be from local businesses we actually endorse. Likewise, we don’t just toss up press releases and call it a blog post. Nothing like seeing the email from your inbox on somone else’s blog the next day.
• Legwork. You know all those posts we wrote about daydrinking? Remember the ones about bar trivia? We don’t just pull these out of our ass. We go there and double check before we fire up our laptop.
• Dedication. We don’t just blog when we feel like it. Not only when the mood strikes us. You’ll never log onto this site and see a post that says “Ooh. I know I haven’t blogged in 6 months. Here’s a post for posting’s sake.” We post actual content five days a week- whether we feel like it or not. And not just about what we ate for dinner. We try to give you something you can use.

We’re assuming the Mobbies will be run this year the same way the GOP primary is, with a new front runner every day, the Eastern Shore counties moving their voting dates up, and an endless number of nominee debates. In the meantime though, head over to the Sun site and give us your vote.