It began life as Letter to Slugger O'Toole, focused primarily on news and comment about Northern Ireland.
Research commissioned in the summer of 2008 by Stratagem in association with ComRes revealed that 96% of the members of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLAs) read the blog "regularly" or "occasionally".
The name of the blog was originally a reference to a sockpuppet character invented by Tim Murphy of New York, on an old CNN community called Peace in Northern Ireland.
Murphy's "character" was invariably drunk on Bushmills, never listened to reasoned argument, and usually espoused strong loyalist politics, which often caught the unwary or recently arrived off guard.
With the stated intention of 'promoting a conversational politics', the awards sought to identify good examples of democratic practice.