It’s awards season in blogworld, too
Unless we pass by Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre on vacation, most of us will never get anywhere near the Academy Awards. But anyone willing to opine online could score one of several blog awards without leaving the nearest coffee shop, cubicle or couch.
Checking out the award sites also can be a winning proposition for readers looking for good blogs to browse and bookmark.
That’s what drove Kevin Aylward to launch the Weblog Awards in 2003. He was tired of seeing the same sites dominate other contests year after year and wanted to give lesser-known blogs a chance at the limelight.
“I don’t think there’s a process available to really determine the best,” said Aylward, Virginia-based publisher of the Wizbang blog network. “The ultimate goal is exposure for finalists—and helping readers find five or six new sites.”
He and several volunteers pick finalists for Best Blog, Best New Blog and subject areas such as law, science, education and gossip. Additional categories group blogs by traffic rankings, introducing small sites such as 2006 winner Liza Was Here (“an unexpectedly Southern thirtysomething bibliophile lesbian mommy blogger”) to a wide audience.
The latest collection of 450 finalists drew more than 525,000 votes from weblogawards.org visitors last month. Winners included heavy hitters Fark, Daily Kos and the Moderate Voice—along with rising stars such as football blog Kissing Suzy Kolber and parenting site Breed ‘Em and Weep.
Although a small group winnows the field, Aylward prides himself on running a transparent contest in which anyone can nominate sites, review nominee lists and see running vote totals during the eight-day balloting period.
The open system has grown so popular organizers seldom feel compelled to pull in overlooked sites like they did in the contest’s early years. “With 4,500 nominees this time, we barely had to add anybody,” Aylward said.
Another measure of the contest’s popularity: Hackers attempt to tilt the voting toward their favorite sites. Aylward thwarts them by watching for unnatural spikes in the voting and adding proprietary defenses to the open-source polling software he uses.
It boils down to a lot of work for paltry pay—ad sales “barely cover the cost of the dedicated server”—but the contest’s creator promised not to burn out anytime soon.
Why think about quitting, he asked, when “people seem to enjoy it now more than ever”? Besides, Aylward will present the 2007 awards live at the Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas this fall.
Maybe he’ll hit a big casino jackpot and make the effort pay off.
Drilling Down
Nominations open today for the 2007 Bloggies. (Although the contest site is Bloggies.com, the event’s also known as the Seventh Annual Weblog Awards, just to keep things nice and confusing.) With 151 finalists in 30 categories last year, the Bloggies also give readers a goldmine of great blogs to explore.
The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences now bestows its Webby Awards on the best business, political and culture/personal blogs—along with more than 60 other Web site categories—at Webbyawards.com. The 2006 winners included the Huffington Post, Cute Overload, 5 Blogs Before Lunch and We Make Money Not Art.
The Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards best reflect the global popularity of blogging. People who know about the contest refer to it as The BOBs, or Best of the Blogs. Check out top sites in 10 languages at thebobs.com.
Among the jury winners in all 15 BOBs categories last year, I only recognized business site PaidContent.org. But the list of user-voted winners featured several English-language sites worth visiting. One of them — an anonymous apology forum called JoeApology.com — could be addictive.
If you get hooked on it, please accept my apology.