The Finalists Have Been Announced!

After weeding through all the spam comments, visiting over 500 sites and checking for category criteria, the finalists for this year's awards have been announced.

And for some reason, the Awards site is looking jacked up in Internet Explorer (naturally!), so you can visit the nomination form by clicking the link below:

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR THE FINALISTS!

We fixed this in the navigation menu also, so clicking "Vote!" will bring you to the same form. This is a minor change until we get the iframe looking decent in Internet Explorer.

All of the finalists will receive a special 125x125 2006 Black Weblog Awards graphic badge for display on their website in the next few days. We also have some other prizes to announce for categories which we will get to later on today.

For now...sleep. Glorious, glorious sleep.

Time to make the donuts....

1,595 ballots. Whew! Thanks to you all for your participation, your voting, and advertising (I think we even saw one person who had a MySpace page devoted to solicting votes!). Now it's crunch time for us to skim through the ballots, weed out the bad ones and post the finalists.

Oh, and please don't send any e-mails asking if you've been nominated. If you plugged yourself on your blog, podcast, videocast or even sent out an e-mail about it, consider yourself nominated. Easy, huh? Besides, with all the work we've got today, we won't have time to sort through ballots and give a nomination count for singular requests.

You can check back tomorrow to find out if your favorites are finalists in this year's Awards.

Thanks again!

Research

We've been getting a bunch of e-mails in asking us the same question:

"How am I supposed to know who to nominate in the _____________ category?"

Research, plain and simple. There's a couple of sites out there, Negrophile in particular, that have a list of Black blogs about a mile long. Click and explore and open your horizons past the few favorite sites of yours. Because if you vote for that favorite site in all categories...well...you know what happens.

You've got a little over seven hours to get in your nominations. Get to clicking!

T-Minus 07:30

If you've been keeping track of the blog and the Awards here, then you know that in a little under eight hours, the nominations will close (7:00 a.m. Eastern time) and they will be tallied to reveal the finalists in the 21 categories.

We will pick the top three blogs for each category according to the votes after we've went through and weeded out the invalid ballots. So all of you who voted for one blog in each category (you know who you are) will have done so for naught -- we're scrapping those so we can have a fair count. I mean, how would it look if the Best International Blog, for example, was blatantly written in the US? Or if the Best LGBT Blog has homophobic slurs? Not very good, and we're definitely going to besmirch the Awards by letting that pass. We're already looking forward into 2007 for ways to decrease that kind of ignorant behavior.

So go ahead and get your votes in now. The form will close at 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, and we will have the finalists posted at midnight on Wednesday, August 16.

Best Video Blog Prize Donated!

Cinqué Hicks of Code Z has donated a choice of one of the following prizes in the Best Video Blog category:

• Conoa EasyFX v1.0 OR


• Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus

Each software package is a $99 value.

Thanks Cinqué!