The Black Weblog Awards Blog

If you’re a winner for any of this year’s Black Weblog Awards, please contact us to receive your winners’ badge(s) if you haven’t done so already. Thanks!

Well, after a bout with the flu and a few interviews here and there, I’m all back up to speed with this year’s Awards, and wanted to share with the group what all transpired through the month of August leading up to the announcement of the Awards.

NOMINATIONS & VOTING

When nominations closed on August 15th, we had 1811 ballots with 7266 nominations. I think this year was the best in terms of keeping the nominations fair; we (me and the programmer, Markus) did so by engineering the ballots so your IP address and e-mail address was logged in our database. We quickly found out that the problem arose where people were getting an error saying they voted from their computer even when they hadn’t. The issue comes with the IP addresses;if you’re on a shared connection (like an office or school) or sharing/leeching wireless Internet or even using more than one computer in a local area network, they all share the same IP address. While we were
able to resolve the issues on a case-by-case basis; what I saw was that people complained about not being able to vote becasue of the IP adddress issue, but when asked to send their IP address (we gave them instructions), they never replied. Oh well… We were also able to
flag users on the back end who we could tell were voting from multiple locations using very similar e-mail addresses and names.

This year was also the first time we had a panel of judges, who are well-versed in blogging, writing, design, and the Internet as a whole. Their additions and insights really helped some great blogs take home awards which may not have been particularly known by the public. Both the popular and judges’ votes blogs were announced at the same time,
surprising the judges with the popular picks and showing the public the full range of blogs in each of the 30 categories.

One common complaint we’ve heard since the Awards started was that the nomination period was entirely too short. So for next year, we’re definitely thinking about extending the nomination period to include more blogs. I haven’t figured out yet how long to extend it to, but more talk of that will go on in the Google group.

PRIZES

Different for this year was that there were no prizes for the winners. Personally, I don’t think it made a difference in terms of excitement and enthusiasm about the Awards. I’m wrestling with the idea of reinstating the prizes for 2008, primarily because a) they are a pain the ass to keep up with and b) donors often think that supplying a prize means they have a say in who wins in that particular category.

It’s just a lot more work on the back end to keep up with, because you have to get addresses and some people want to remain anonymous and…it’s just a lot. If I do prizes for next year, we’d definitely need a volunteer to coordinate it all. The prizes people donated were nice too, ranging from books to DVDs to free ad space to an iPod to cold hard cash.

CATEGORIES

I’d like to think we reached a happy place with the categories for this year. The only suggestion for a new category I received was “Best Style/Fashion Blog”, and I think that would work well since this year, the finalists in the “Best Niche Blog” were…well…style and fashion blogs! I would like to see more great blogs being showcased in some of the categories which didn’t get a lot of nominees (Best Business Blog, Best Food Blog, etc.). And while I realize that it’s kinda up to the person nominating to expand their horizons and know of other blogs, it wouldn’t hurt on our end to let you guys and gals know about a few
gems out there too. I just worry that folks would think we are endorsing certain blogs over others, but I do think we can do our part by showcasing blogs you may not know about. Maybe something like a “BWA Blog of the Week” type award. I don’t know yet.

THE FUTURE

Advertising, advertising, advertising. Word of mouth actually did help out a lot this year, with the podcast interviews and more than a few mentions on NPR. Sponsorship is something which we really are looking for, and had a few interested companies, but none of them followed through. Like I said year, with time and support comes progress, so we’ll press on. I’m working now on a pretty big possible sponsorship, and if this goes well, it would be a huge step towards having an actual physical awards ceremony by 2009 (one of my goals).

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

We’ll be shutting down the voting booth at 4pm EDT today, so hurry and get those votes in if you still haven’t already. You’ve only got a few hours left!

“For your award survey to require folks to vote in all categories is [W]ack!”
“[W]hy is is mandatory to cast a vote for every single category even if I’ve never even heard of the blogs listed.”
“[V]oting in every category is dumb - i only keep up with three blogs here; i’m voting for whatever in the rest”

This is probably the question we’ve been getting the most since the finalists were announced, so it’s time we explained why the voting is done in this manner.

The Black Weblog Awards recognizes bloggers out there that work hard doing something which they love, and they love sharing that with all of us. As evidenced by the increasing number of categories over the years, that knowledge spreads across many different realms of knowledge and experience, and we think it would do those blogs who are finalists a great disservice if they didn’t have an equal shot at everyone’s vote.

The opinions above are a bit discouraging; even if you only visit the finalist blogs (or blogs within that genre) this one time for the sake of voting, it would behoove you to broaden your horizons past just the blogs you’re familiar with and learn about some others. Who knows…you might stumble across one you like, and then you’ve got a new favorite blog to read!

We obviously can’t control user intent; we can just hope that those voting will be proactive and smart enough to realize the importance and intent of the Awards, and use that information to vote accordingly.

This question and post will also be added to the FAQ page.

It has come to our attention that one of the finalists for the “Best Political/News Blog” has publicly admitted on their blog that they have used more than one e-mail address to vote in the Awards. After checking our database and the finalist’s post which admits this, we have disqualified their blog, BlackPerspective.net, from the “Best Political/News Blog” category, and any votes cast for that blog are now invalid.

We have promoted the fourth highest nominated blog for that category, The Field Negro, to their finalist spot.