Yes, Choppers, it is here once again. That magical time of year when for two weeks we generally pester the hell out of your for votes in an online contest so that our modest little blogging hobby can receive a tiny bit of validation from the media establishment.

Voting officially begins today in the Baltimore Sun’s Maryland’s Outstanding Blogs contest. Called the Mobbies for short, the yearly contest is an outstanding way to discover the best blogs being written in and about Maryland. If you like hyperlocal content but don’t have the wherewithal to follow an endless chain of blogroll links and manage various Google alerts, we’d definitely recommend reading over all the nominations, not just clicking over and voting for the Chop. (It’s not even behind the Paywall! Sweet Deal!)

This year the contest has a stronger focus than ever on social media, including categories for Facebook fan pages, Instagram accounts, Tumblr blogs, and of course the ever popular Twitter feed.

So take a few minutes and get familiar with a few of our favorite reads like The Baltimore Diner, Baltimore Slumlord Watch, Mobtown Shank, South BMore.com, What Weekly, the City That Breeds, The Inverse Delirium, Let’s Give Peas a Chance, Baltimore Boy, and of course the blog that would easily win if there was a ‘Best Name’ category: I Hate JJ Redick.

That’s a lot of good blogs, huh? And there’s even more over there that we like. Too many to name, honestly. So with that many great blogs to choose from, why should you vote for the Chop? Well, setting aside our award-winning writing from years past, here’s what we’ve done for you lately:

We helped you get out of a jam when the city towed your car. We made our own iPhone app for this site and gave it to you for free. We even bought you a beer. Well, not technically but we did tell you where to get some free ones and some 2-4-1’s in our guide to Baltimore Beer Week.

And that was just last week! Remember that time we showed you what Baltimore would look like1000 years from now? Or how about the time we pointed you toward a little-known urban oasis between Remington and Station North? There was the time we invented the Chancery Cocktail, which is perfect for Fall seasonal drinking. it’s the perfect thing to call for at The Food Market, where we gave you a sneak peak before the rest of the Balto-Blogosphere.

Remember the time we made you all those punk rock ringtones so your phone can play ‘Suck My Left One’ every time someone calls you? We did that out of love. We even traversed the streets by bicycle from Pikesville to Eastwood to bring you and updated and accurate list of Baltimore’s best small, ethnic grocers. All great places to get the ingredients for Shakshouka, which will change your brunch life forever.

We even showed you a bunch of pictures of hot chicks on bikes. If that’s not love we don’t know what is.

And we’ve got some good stuff planned for this week as well. That is, provided you can read it. If Hurricane Sandy ends up doing what the Derecho did, we may all be out of luck blogwise. You may not even be reading this right now. You may be cleaning out your fridge and obsessively checking your phone for power outage updates.

But if you are on your phone use a little bit of that precious battery life to head over to the Sun’s contest page and vote for the Chop.