RSSJuly 2006 Archive
Tag, You're It
By Maurice
For those of you that use Technorati tags on your posts, if you manage to mention the Black Weblog Awards, could you tag your post as “black weblog awards”? That way, we (and you too) can keep track of the ongoing coverage from here on in.
Thanks!
Prizes, Where Art Thou?
By Maurice
Last year, we depended upon the benevolent kindness of strangers for donating prizes to the Black Weblog Awards. This year is no different.
If you would like to donate a prize to the Black Weblog Awards in any of our twenty categories, feel free to contact us and we will set it up. Donors will receive an acknowledgment on the website on the Categories page under their respective category of donation. Donors will also be responsible for sending out their prizes to the winners (announced on September 3).
Two New Categories!
By Maurice
We’ve added two more categories to this year’s Awards:
- Best Original Content
- Blog to Watch
Find out more about these two on the Categories page. Special thanks to Bernard Tarver for the suggestions!
Advertising
By Maurice
We’re debating this year on whether or not to do any hardcore advertising for the Awards. Last year, we didn’t do a whole lot other than word of mouth and a few banners. (We’re going to do some banners in a variety of sizes this year — stay tuned for that.)
Now, Internet advertising is a huge venture with services like Text Link Ads and Google AdSense, and you almost have to do something in order to get recognized. We don’t have a huge advertising budget (i.e., anything we have left over from our paychecks after paying bills and buying groceries), so any sites that wouldn’t mind giving us a free plug would be greatly appreciated.
On the flipside of advertising, it does cost some money to put the Awards together each year, so we may put ads on the site to help buffer the cost of operations. Personally, I think it should be ad-free, but the bandwidth bill says otherwise. We’ll gauge public interest and see what we’re going to do.
New Rules + Wufoo
By Maurice
Make sure to check out the Rules page to see the changes in this year’s Awards. Last year, we were completely overwhelmed with letting people vote as many times as they wanted for their favorite blogs and relied on the user to self-moderate themselves.
Well…that kinda didn’t work. Malformed URLs meant searching and navigating and guessing what the site was. Some ballots came in with no URLs at all and just names like “Mike’s site”. Well…who’s Mike? Help us out here, ya know? And of course, there are the spammers with tons of empty and fake ballots.
This year, we’re changing all of that and making it more stringent. Now, you can only submit your nominations once during the nomination period and can only vote once when the finalists are chosen. This makes the contest fairer to everyone and not a popularity contest of sorts.
In addition to these new forms, we’re using an awesome new site called Wufoo for our forms. Last year, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for imposing any restrictions. Wufoo powers not only the nomination and finalist forms, but our contact form as well, so if you have any questions for us, feel free to use it.
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