We are announcing today that polls will close Thursday November 8, 2007 at 10:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is 5:00 p.m. (EST) and 2:00 p.m. (PST).

Since Friday approximately The Weblog Awards has had over 1.3 million page views and 615,000 visitors and that number keeps skyrocketing upward. Our Site Meter is wide open for readers to poke around in. If you want to see who is voting and where they're coming from there are lots of interesting stats there.

Yesterday we added poll embedding options for a majority of categories. Next year we plan to have a scoreboard widget available for sites to show a small running results listing of their favorite polls. We just ran out of time this year to get that built, and frankly it's a little too late to be of much value.

Finally, we get lots of questions and accusations about various sites cheating or encouraging cheating. We do investigate every complaint and take action where appropriate. There is a bit of a disconnect between our "one vote per day" rule and what is technically possible in any voting system. We are able to limit voters to one vote per day per computer. Historically we've not stressed out about this because, A) it's not a large issue, and B) trying to crackdown on that would disenfranchise large numbers of voters and violate the spirit of fun which is one of our guiding principles. If you want to vote on your home PC and your work PC we're not going to stop you. We've seen just about every trick in the book since 2003, and we know cheating when we see it. Pointing out that it is possible to vote once a day per PC in a blog comment isn't really on par with attempting to hack our polls, is it?

We concentrate on identifying and removing actual cheaters.