Let’s talk about the elephant in of the room – our Kickstarter campaign flopped hard. Does this mean that a live ceremony in 2011 is out of the question? No way! (Although that $15K would have been nice — a huge and heartfelt thanks to all those who pledged their financial support.) We’ve been fortunate to be able to keep the Awards going every year on a shoestring budget with no sponsors or outside financial help. However, without that support, it becomes difficult to grow and do new things with the Awards, like have a ceremony, or do a live stream, or offer prizes for every category. A big thanks to our media partner BlogWorld & New Media Expo – if you’re out in Vegas in October, look for our logo there. Also, thanks to Jonnice Slaughter of Chatterbox Publicity for her press work and helping secure a prize partner. Speaking of prize partners, thanks to Fourblend, Blogging While Brown, and The Kenny Burns Show. Seriously, big thanks to them — companies that get what we’re doing and help support what we do are amazing. And hopefully next year, we’ll have more to add to their ranks.

With regards to sponsorship, we do have a sponsorship coordinator that has been actively pursuing leads for months now, and the process for finding sponsors continues. Hopefully we’ll have great news to announce by the end of the year. We have even added a PayPal donate button to every page; 100% of the proceeds will go directly to the development of the Black Weblog Awards. If you have a service or product that you would like to get in front of the Black Weblog Awards audience, contact Brandon Sheats at brandon [at] blackweblogawards dot com.

NOMINATIONS & VOTING

This year has been the smoothest year thus far in terms of nominations and voting, and the higher turnout numbers reflect that as well. We had to make a somewhat last minute switch to Wufoo for our voting, which you may recall we also used back in 2006. There are some limitations to the system, but overall, it was nothing major that affected the cadence of the Awards. We didn’t have the social media integration that we had last year since we had to change our voting system, but hopefully, we’ll be able to bring that back in 2011.

There was also the usual fuss about the winners – the popular vote winners and the judges’ vote winners. We’ve been flirting with the idea of cutting out the popular vote and switching to just a judging panel, but some things would have to fine-tuned in order to make that happen. However, the popular vote could also use a bit of tweaking as well. Our original plan, if we were to have a live show — was to have a more stringent judging panel, take nominations from the public, and perhaps have some sort of “people’s choice” award. Will we do that for next year? It really depends on if we have the resources to put on a live show. Right now though, voting and nominations are good. If you didn’t get in your votes or nominations this year, then you need to subscribe to our email newsletter so you get the latest news on when we begin in 2011. Don’t ask us now, because all we’ll say is “sometime in 2011″. More than likely though, nominations will begin in June 2011, end near the end of July 2011, and you’ll have the whole month of August 2011 to vote for the finalists. When you look at other blog awards, we probably have the longest nomination and voting periods to accommodate as many people as possible. Remember when you only had two weeks to nominate then two weeks to vote?

CATEGORIES

This year, we had 36 categories. Was it enough? Based on Twitter and Facebook responses, no. We got lots of suggestions, such as splitting up the Best Fashion or Beauty Blog category into two separate categories, having a category just for men, one just for women, one for book reviewers, one for book authors, one for online magazines…and those are just the ones I can recall off the top of my head. At this rate, we’ll hit 40 categories for next year, but that’s only if we don’t eliminate any categories. As we mentioned in a previous post, some of our categories this year were not very popular with the voting public; however, keeping them showcases the diversity of the Black blogosphere. Trust me, if we cut out the categories which didn’t get a lot of support, we’d only have 4-5 categories left! Here’s another thing to mark on your calendars: we always ask for new category suggestions in March. All your suggestions will be looked at then, so anything sent before then will just be put on the shelf until later (whether through email, Facebook, or Twitter).

THE FUTURE

We stepped up our game this year on the social media end in large part to our amazing intern Stefanie. The extra help really let us use our time more wisely to site improvements (notice all the new user-supplied content?), forging partnerships, and seeking out sponsors. As you can see, we’re trying to grow, and we need your help and support to make that happen. The fact that we are still keeping this going all these years is a real testament to the work we’re doing and the community we’re representing and showcasing.

Thanks to all of this year’s winners, to our judges, to our media and prize partners, and to the voting public for keeping the Black Weblog Awards going strong!

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.

NOMINATIONS & VOTING

This year, nominations far surpassed last year’s totals, with 1,500+ ballots and 9,400+ nominations. Voting went smoothly using last year’s system of checking ballots by e-mail address and IP address, and we still received some of the same issues with people not being able to vote if they’re on a public connection. Now this is outlined in our FAQ, but this year’s complaints seemed to be a special mix of condescension and just outright foolishness. Now we do reply to every e-mail we send, particularly about voting issues, and always offer a solution (in the case of an error about voting from your computer, we ask for your IP address and gives you directions on how to do obtain it), but no one ever follows up! This year, no one sent us their IP address (we can easily open a backdoor for voting if IP address is an issue), so what do we do? We can’t help if you don’t help us, you know? We’ve researched ways other blog awards do their voting (most use time-based cookies or Flash polls or just don’t have public voting), and we think that our way is pretty fair, especially once you’ve had the time to go through the finalists and vote.

Which brings me to the voting. Lots of people expressed disinterest (and downright hatred) for having to vote for every category in order for their vote to be counted. Many said they did not (and would not) go through all the finalists and would just pick either whom they knew, or entirely at random. Given that the purpose of the Black Weblog Awards is to empower, encourage and recognize ALL black blogs out there, that’s why we include that rule. Granted, changing voter apathy is an arduous task, but I’d like to think there’s a lot of information we provide and a lot of new blogs outside of what you just may be familiar with and read from time to time. Hell, if we cut down the categories to the ones that only the majority of voters were interested, we’d be in the single digits. The fact that we still receive e-mails about new categories (some good, some obtuse) means that there’s more out there we’re not covering.

So here’s what we’re thinking about for next year (none of this is set in stone yet):

• Blog registration: Basically a blog registers itself with the BWAs, URL and all, and this becomes their official “nomination” ballot (this would strike out the whole “you can’t nominate yourself” rule). This would hopefully also squash all the “why wasn’t my site nominated” emails/rants/threats we receive, as well as offering some built in QA for the judges and voters.
• An increased nomination period: If we implement the new blog registration, then we may extend the nomination period by a few weeks.
• Lifting the global voting requirement: When we relaunch the site, we may have individual voting pages for each category. Again, this is tied to the new blog registration.
• New rules: If we implement these new features, of course, we’ll have to have new rules. Plus, coming up on the fifth year of the Awards, we are going to include a new rule for how many times a blog can win in a certain category. It was actually an original rule from 2005, but we waited to really implement it until a few Awards had passed.

PRIZES

Many thanks this year to Toby Morning of Blue Monitor; he donated prizes for the Best New Blog and Blog of the Year winners. For next year, I think we will cut out prizes altogether. While we had prize coordinators ready, we didn’t receive enough feedback and participation to utilize them this year. 2009 will probably be the last year we offer prizes, and again, it would depend on what kind of input we receive.

CATEGORIES

We’re thinking of cutting three to five categories for next year. I won’t mention which ones, but we’ve been keeping track of the popularity of the categories and looking at the ratio of individual category nominations to the full number of nominations, and there are a few on the chopping block. Based on input we’ve received though, we have at least three new categories to add. Ideally, we want the number of categories to remain at or near 30. But we have to weed out the ones which don’t get much crowd participation and replace them with ones that the people want and that we feel are relevant to the Black blogging community.

CONTESTS

This year’s contest for the new theme and look of the Awards went well. Wasn’t the new look and logo great? We may have another contest for next year’s theme, so be on the lookout for that coming up in the next few months. Of course, we are looking for quality (see this year’s theme for the caliber we’re looking for), so all you artists and graphic designers get ready. We may have some other contests in the future as well.

THE FUTURE

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, our logo/theme designer winner Shirley B., and thanks to you, the people, for helping to make the Black Weblog Awards even better for this year.

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.

VOTING

We tried to make it as fair as possible by letting people nominate their favorite blogs in each of the 21 categories. Boy, did that blow up in our faces. Clearly, the mass nominations were NOT working, and making the final votes open didn’t help either. However, most people played it fair and we didn’t have to do anything drastic to keep the votes legit other than weed out spam comments. And there were plenty of them! For 2007, we’re thinking of ways to make it fair and even, but still representative of the black blogospheres out there. One way we’ve thought to do this was draft a committee of people to pick nominations for the categories. But do we pick bloggers? Non-bloggers? Bloggers could work best, but what if they picked their own sites? And would people on the committee be eligible to win prizes for their sites? If we did the committee system, they would not be eligible. But if we got non-bloggers on the committee, then people would decry who they nominated because — surprise, surprise — they don’t blog. It’s a slippery slope that I hope we’ll climb over the next few months. Because August 2007 will be here before we know it and that’ll be a wrap, baby.

PRIZES

It’s come to our attention that some finalists still have NOT received prizes and that some prize donators have NOT gotten in contact with the winners. The thing is, we can’t really crack the whip on people and say “Hey, you said you were going to donate…now do it!” We’ve tried. It doesn’t work, and generally just makes the donators mad. Please, if you’re a winner who hasn’t received your prize or if you’re a donator who hasn’t been able to get in touch with a winner, “drop us a line”:https://blackweblogawards.wufoo.com/forms/contact/ and we’ll do our best to straighten it out. Next year, we will probably definitely cut the prize aspect OUT. Having prizes is a good idea, but the Awards are really about recognition, and it ends up being more on the back end that we have to do after the Awards are announced. Tracking down winners for physical awards was really just an “extra” that we thought would be cool. Who knew it would end up creating such a hassle because some people want to remain anonymous and others don’t want to give on what they’ve promised?

CATEGORIES

Was 21 too many? Was 10 not enough? It’s a split decision in our camp, and judging from the e-mails we received during the Awards, it seemed like 21 was too many. It’s hard to say what we should keep and what should go. Some categories had a ton of nominations, and others had just a few. Again, it goes back to the nominations and voting. We got e-mails saying that we should have “picked” this blog for a category. Keep in mind that there was no “picking” going on; we left it up to the people, and unfortunately, they chose the same folks over and over again. One thing that switching to a committee-based voting system would do is even out the nominatins across the categories, not to mention give more depth to the Awards than the network of well-known and well-networked blogs. For now though, I think we’ll keep our 21 categories. Who knows though? A “Best Food Blog” award could be in the future….

THE FUTURE

Of course, there’s several things with the Awards which we hardly were able to delve into this year. Advertising is one thing — originally, we got by on word of mouth to let people know about them. However, we may start stepping it up into doing Internet or print ads in the future. Sponsorship is another thing — the Awards have always been free (as in speech and beer), but a little financial backing could do wonders in many areas we discussed before. This year, we used a startup company called Wufoo for our form provider, and that worked well. I’m sure Wufoo will be around for years to come, so we’ll probably use them next year as well. Don’t worry — we hopefully won’t have the same issues with links as we did this year on the form. We have other big ideas for the Awards too, but right now isn’t the best time to utilize them since..well…we’re just not there yet. But with time and support comes progress, so as long as we have that, we should be OK.

So again, thanks to the winners, thanks to our donors, thanks to Wufoo and thanks to you, the people, for helping to make the Black Weblog Awards a reality. Any relevant suggestions you have out there for us are more than welcome. And we might even reply too! But seriously, we want to make the Black Weblog Awards a good thing for everyone, so if you have suggestions, make ‘em plain and let us know.