Rules and Categories Front and Center

From the front page, you can go directly to the About, Rules, and Categories pages, which will put the information you want to know right there for the clicking. Learn about the history of the Awards, and new rules and categories for this year (by the way, we will be asking for input on categories soon!).

Connect With Us Online

On every page are links to our Facebook and Twitter profiles. Coming soon, we will have an RSS feed of all the Black Weblog Award winners blogs! You can keep up with updates from all the winners from 2005 to now with just one click!

Spiffy New Contact Form

It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t give you a little something jazzy — enter our contact form. Just click the “Contact Us” link in the navigation and voilá! Just don’t send us any nominations through the contact form — they just get trashed anyway.

Revamped E-mail Newsletter

Many of you who voted last year also opted into our e-mail newsletter. Our new newsletter will debut in March and will be sent out every two weeks, including latest news about the Awards, our winners, and our partners! If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter already, now is the perfect time. Click here to sign up!

That’s about all for now; be on the lookout for our newsletter and for information about new categories for this year’s Awards!

You can also catch us online at Twitter and Facebook (we have a fan page and a group) for more information or to talk about the Awards.

Here are a few of the changes with this new site:

- Better integrated blog: The blog has always been available, but it’s been tucked off in the navigation. And if we’re the Black Weblog Awards, why not go ahead and put our blog front and center? The Black Weblog Awards blog is now better integrated on the front page of the site so you can easily check out what’s going on with the Awards as well as other news. We plan to have guest authors from time to time from some of the leading voices in the Black blogosphere.

- New nominating/voting system: We finally decided to lift that “you can’t nominate yourself” restriction from the rules. Blog owners can now nominate themselves in any of our categories through our new process. They are given a unique nomination link they can use to get their readers to vote for them in their nominated categories up until July 24. Then, we’ll take the top five nominated blogs in each category and those will be the finalists. Beginning August 1, you’ll be able to vote for finalists in those categories, and finalist voting will wrap up on August 31. (Yep, you get the whole month to vote for the finalists.) Winners will be announced on September 4.

As we keep building and growing out the Black Weblog Awards, we’ll keep you informed of what’s going on via the blog, so stay tuned!

No? Well hopefully those aren’t flu-like symptoms.

2009 is ramping up to be the best year ever for the Black Weblog Awards. (Yes, we say that every year…and we mean it too!) We’re working on a new temp site just in time for this year’s SXSW, and we anticipate the new full site launch near the end of Q2 just in time for the Awards. There are quite a few surprises this year that should help make this year’s Awards one for the record books.

Feel free to follow us on Twitter and join our Facebook fan page. Stay tuned!