The Oscars, the Emmys, the Pulitzers and the Booker Prize are passé. The new age avatars of awards are meant for blogs! Bloggers have finally started to reap the benefits of what started out as the nerd's diary.

This year, sponsors and organizers of the second annual Blooker Prize have raised the stakes for the first place, and have received a host of innovative nominees for the title. The blooks will compete in categories such as non-fiction, fiction and comics, to grab the total prize fund of $15,000 (£7,750). The overall winner will be announced on 14 May '07 and will get to keep the booty of $10,000 (£5,170).

An interesting entrant is 'The Doorbells of Florence'—short-listed in the fiction category. This blog comprises a collection of 36 color photographs of Florentine doorbells, accompanied by a story about the people or things that may be inside. The blog has been dubbed the first volume of 'flicktion'.

A Blooker nominee that has now become a book include Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl, while Last year's Blooker Prize awardee, 'Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously'—has now sold over 100,000 copies and is being made into a movie.

American artist Frank Warren's 'My Secret: A Post-Secret Book' is one of this year's short-listed blooks, which has been read by 3.5 million visitors each month and has just won the Best Topical and Best Community categories at the annual Bloggie awards, Another award for the best blogs on the Internet which is now in its seventh year.

Judges for this year's Blooker Prize include Arianna Huffington, who has been called "queen of the blogosphere" and the journalist Nick Cohen.

Gail Jordan, director of PR, Lulu.com said, "Lulu.com is the premier on-line marketplace that provides a platform for people to create, buy, sell and control digital content on demand. Lulu has over 100,000 recently published titles and more that 2500 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries. Lulu is changing the world of publishing by enabling creators of books, video, periodicals and multimedia and other content to publish their work themselves with complete editorial and copyright control. Lulu empowers people and corporations to create high quality content products to sell directly to their customers and the rest of the Lulu marketplace. With storefronts provided as well as other marketing assistance, creators are fully supported to profit from their work. With Lulu offices in the US, Canada and Europe, customers can reach the globe."

Web logs, as Blogs were referred to, in the good old days, have come a long way, to command the kind of respect and adulation they enjoy today. This new platform for creativity has transformed the average Joe and his nerdy neighbor into journalists, novelists and even philosophers, reaching out to millions of people across the globe, with the help of the internet.

One hundred and ten blooks from 15 countries were entered for this year's Blooker Prize. Technorati, a blog search engine, estimates that some 175,000 new blogs are created every day.