So, out of curiosity, what happened to the Second Amendment / Right to Bear Arms / etc. category?

Kevin,
I'd love to have my blog win an award, but, whoever submitted it for consideration mis-categorized it. "Georgia Grown" (http://georgiagrown.blogspot.com/) is not a food-related blog. It's focus is religious in nature .... leadership tools and insights for pastors.
Thnaks,
~HC

No problem. I *highly* recomend that you go nominate it in the religious blog category. And maybe leave this note in the food blog category as well. There are so many entries we and requests and comments that we tend to rely on what we see in the comments to the nomination posts.

Some quick research didn't reveal thousands of blogs dedicated solely to guns and second ammedment issues. My suspicion is that sites in that site you might call gun blogs would fit natural fits for nomination in categories like Best Sports Blog, Best Military Blog, or some of the political blog categories.

No Best Laundry Lint Blog category? That is a topic dear to my heart.

Kevin: Honestly, are you guys considering every blog that is nominated or do you guys pretty much have your finalists and winners selected?

Seems like an awfully quick turnaround time to go through hundreds of blogs in each category and then select just a few finalists and give people a week to vote on them before the awards ceremony on the 9th?

Is this basically just one big popularity contest based on how many "votes" one blogger got in each category? Because if that's the case you're not really deciding which is truly the best blog in each category, you're basically rewarding the person who brought the most traffic to your site.

Either way, the awards are a great idea...but honestly the whole process seems a little shady to me.

Thoughts, comments?

-Chris

whatpushesmybuttons.com

Previous message brought to you courtesy of Mr. Diplomacy.

Dude, no one likes a suck up.

All I'm looking for is an honest answer. I'm not the only one with this question, but at least I have the balls to ask the question.

Because if the contest is less based on actual content and more based on a popularity contest, then just give the award to ICanHazCheezeburger or some site like that and be done with it.

Read this: http://2007.weblogawards.org/docs/weblogaward-faq.php
then this: http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/a_note_to_nominees.php

The current number of finalists selected is zero. We don't have a secret, hidden list of preselected finalists. We start with the nominees made this year.

The finalist selection process is based on quality, but we're under no illusion as to our ability to pick the best 10 blogs for each category that everyone would agree upon. What we are looking for is 10 good and representative blogs to make up a finalist slate. We do not determine the winner, the people voting do. We just handle cutting down the thousands of nominees to ~490 finalists.

Before we get to rating the nominees we do lots of cut downs. For example, if a blog hasn't posted a story in October it's probably not going to be a finalist. Ditto if the content is all external links or twitter posts. We also do balancing, so that not all the finalists in the sports blog category (for example) are about one particular sport. The ecosystem categories are included so that blogs of (presumably) similar readership levels can compete on a level playing field.

Sucking up as opposed to having a conspiracy theory based on no evidence? Instead of wasting time trying to figure out in advance why the odds are against you, try working on a game plan. There are ways you can legitimately increase the odds in your favor. Unfortunately you seem to be predisposed to making excuses in advance of perceived failure.

Thanks for your response Kevin.

I was just looking for the rationale behind selecting the finalists. It's understandbly an impossible job to just select 10 finalists in each category among thousands of entries. And for that I salute you guys. I'm sure you get thanked often for your work but the blogging community really does thank you for your hard work.

In reading your post it really is a subjective process as far as narrowing down the list of finalists to the top 10, and then again to the winners. Obviously everyone has their own subjective take on their category, whether it be sports, humor, etc. I just wanted to see if you really did consider every blog that was nominated or if you only got to the ones that received the most amount of votes during the nomination process.

In reading your explanations of selections it says that each category judge is allowed their own suggestions of finalists which would be asterisked and then decided upon. So in theory each judge has their own pre-determined favorites they're going to add, whom may or may not have been nominated, which could be added to the list of finalists? If so each site that is reviewed as a possible finalist would then, at least in this judge's mind, be 'judged' against the site they are personally recommending.

I guess what I'm getting at is that we know the awards are subjective so obviously there's no science into determining the finalists besides making sure the site qualifies as legit within that category. I just wanted to make sure it was a fairly judged contest and not just a popularity contest based on pre-conceived notions, because we all know what the most popular blogs are in each category already.

Oh and PJ I'm not making excuses...I'm just asking questions. I've judged blogs before on other sites and know it's a completely subjective thing. But when you're talking about a scale of having to review thousands of blogs in a short amount of time it's hard for the reviewer to not have some preconceived ideas in their head, at the very least to make their job easier.

And frankly, I don't expect to be nominated as a finalist. I'm sure there are better, funnier blogs out there which are 100 times more popular than my site. But honestly, I'm a winner already. Why? Because my site is popular and I have a loyal following and other talented bloggers have acknowledged my work publicly. Over 47,000 page views since March is pretty damn good in my book. Granted, maybe that's as much traffic as ICanHazCheezburger gets in an hour but to me, considering this is a hobby, I'm happy people enjoy what I have to say. I don't need a game plan to beg for votes. Only people desparate to win something beg for votes.

The judge suggested finalists is rarely used anymore, and only in categories where the number of nominees is (relatively) low.

We've also been accused of failing to remember blogs who were finalists and placed well in previous years, when those blogs don't get nominated. In a perfect world we'd remember them and "suggest" them as finalists again this year, but often that doesn't happen. No one is too broken up about that on our end, but I understand the finalists gripe.

It's not possible to eliminate the human element from the process, but we all work on staying aware of our biases. I'm the final authority on every finalist list so I take several looks at the slate to check for biases of all sorts. The people that work with me on this are all trusted folks. Like me they have no agenda other than to make the best list they can.

Ultimately this whole awards process is about driving traffic to all of the nominated blogs. If we do that (which we do) then everyone who participates is in some sense a winner.

I've already gotten a bunch of traffic from these Weblog Awards from people looking at the nominations here so I know it does generate a lot of traffic. My favorite thing about these weblog awards is that you are merciless towards cheaters which is great. I do know there is a lot of cheating going on in similar online awards contests by people voting from the same computer over and over again.