2009 BWA Postmortem

By Maurice | View Comments

• categories
• nominations
• postmortem
• voting

Another year, another Black Weblog Awards has come and gone. This is the fifth year we’ve put on these Awards, and every time, I learn something new. The blogosphere is changing for us, and we are definitely changing the blogosphere in many ways. I think that was definitely reflected in this year’s winners and in our finalists.

NOMINATIONS & VOTING
This year, we switched up how we did the nominations and voting so we could allow for more time for the public to submit their blogs and more time for people to come to an informed decision on who to vote for. Did it help overall? Not really. Voting went smoothly using last year’s system of checking ballots by e-mail address and IP address, and we all but eliminated the issues with people not being able to vote if they’re on a public connection since people could nominate their own blog AND had a unique nomination URL for their blog. We were even able to integrate Twitter into the mix and allowed people who voted to tweet their vote once completed. Pretty sweet, huh? For next year though, we have come to a deliberate decision concerning how we will do nominations and voting, and it’s a necessary move for us (right now) so we can grow bigger and better. For the 2010 Black Weblog Awards (and perhaps beyond), we will move to a more curated system of blog selection for winners. This means that people will still be able to nominate blogs, but rather than having the public vote for all of the categories, we will have our panel of judges choose. In short, we are eliminating the Popular Vote. Well…sort of. We will have a “people’s choice” type of category where the public will vote for that winner, and it will not be chosen by the judges. You may be wondering why we are coming to this decision; well, check out the end of the post for more information. We have decided to hold off on this for now.

CATEGORIES
The categories, the categories…I think this year, we really hit the sweet spot in terms of the categories being representative of blogs out there. But like we do every year, we are going to look at the popularity of categories and weigh that with the public voting pattern in order to determine what to keep and what to add on for next year. In order to coincide with our future plans though, we are going to try and keep the number of categories to around 30-35. When we start the planning process next year and ask for public input, please let us know what categories you’d like to see!

THE FUTURE
Since the Awards have started in 2005, it’s been a completely bootstrapped operation. Money is paid out of our personal pockets to keep the hosting running, pay for prizes (well, in 2005, at least), market the Awards, and basically keep this thing going strong. For the longest time, it has been a one-man operation in terms of finances. We ask for donations and sponsorships every year, but have only received one financial donation during the tenure of the Awards (and that was for $100). Keeping the Awards alive on a shoestring budget every year is now starting to take its toll, particularly in this economic climate. Simply put, we can’t grow like we want because of the lack of resources and support. So for this year, we will be actively seeking out financial sponsors (we’ve brought on a sponsorship person) so we can take the Black Weblog Awards to the next level. We need to attract dollars to do the things we want to do, like have physical awards, an actual awards ceremony, and get big media coverage. In short, we have to step our game up. So that’s what we’re going to do! We have some exciting announcements coming up for next year, so stay tuned to the blog. Sign up for our e-mail newsletter as well so you can get the news as we receive it!

As always, we welcome all suggestions, so let your voice be heard! Change is in the air, and here at the Black Weblog Awards, it’s no different. Your input is important to us.

So again, thanks to the winners, thanks to our judges, thanks to our programmer Markus and Black Web 2.0, and thanks to you, the people, for helping to make the Black Weblog Awards even better for this year.