The Weblog Awards - Weblog Award FAQ

The Weblog Awards
« Weblog Award FAQ »

Welcome Guest. Please Login or Register.
May 21, 2013, 2:06am

Disclaimer: Any messages posted here are the responsibility of the poster(s) and and do not necessarily express the views of the operators of The Weblog Awards. This space is provided as a service to The Weblog Awards community as a space to discuss the awards, ask questions, and discuss issues. Members are liable for their own conduct at all times.

Return to The 2008 Weblog Awards.

The Weblog Awards :: General :: FAQ :: Weblog Award FAQ

Page 1 of 3 » Jump to page Go

Author

Topic: Weblog Award FAQ (Read 21,090 times)

Kevin Aylward
Administrator

member is offline

Joined: Dec 2006
Gender: Male

Posts: 91
Karma: 5

Weblog Award FAQ
« Thread Started on Dec 7, 2006, 8:56pm »

Q: What are The Weblog Awards all about?

A: Fun! The 2007 Weblog Awards continue the traditions of the previous four editions. What sets The Weblog Awards apart from other awards (such as the Bloggies) is:

1) Open and public nominations
2) Categories that allow blogs of similar readership levels to compete
3) Real time vote totals
4) Quick turnaround of the results
5) Fun, fun, fun...

In a nutshell The Weblog Awards is about honoring hundreds of blogs (nearly 500 this year) versus the same couple blogs over and over. Blogs are generally limited to appearing as finalists in one category (that's a guideline not an absolute rule), ensuring that the same blog doesn't sweep the awards from top to bottom. The notable exceptions to that rule is the Best Blog and Best Podcast categories, where finalists may appear in other categories. The Weblog Awards is about expanding your blog reading horizons by exploring the hundreds of finalists you may not be familiar with. Each poll includes links to the finalists as well as RSS or Atom feeds, if available.

Q: Who can vote?

A: Anyone. You must have Macromedia Flash version 7 (or greater) installed and Javascript enabled or you will be prompted to get the latest version.

Q: What if I don't want to install the Macromedia Flash plug-in?

A: You won't be able to vote. Sorry there's no alternative means of voting.

Q: I can't vote. The system says I've already voted, but I haven't. What gives?

A: We've spent a great deal of time testing the voting system to ensure that it works on all sorts of platforms and browsers, so errors should be extremely rare. Are you sure you haven't voted in the last 24 hours from the machine you are on now?

If you are running some piece of privacy software which anonymizes your browsing session it is possible that you might be prevented from voting. In such cases (which are very rare) you typically won't even see a poll. We haven't tested the voting system with every piece of privacy software, mostly because the voting system does not use browser cookies in any way. Your browser cookie settings have no effect on the operation of the poll.

Q: When I try to vote on a poll it asks me to "Allow" or "Deny" storage to weblogawards.org. What should I do?

Most people will never see such a prompt. If you do, click "Allow" otherwise you will not be able to vote in The Weblog Awards.

Q: What about cheaters?

A: At The Weblog Awards, they never prosper. There is no such thing as a perfect security system, but we have multiple levels of security and everything is logged and inspected. Were someone to manage to massively cheat we will: block their access; report them to their ISP, university, or employer; then remove their votes from the totals. In both 2003 and 2004 we had to deal with scripting attacks, so it's something we've planned for. It's also a reason why we note on every poll that results are not final until they are certified.

Q: How are finalist picked?

A: To understand how 10 finalists are picked in each category you first have to understand how they were nominated. There was a call for nominations early in October for all of the categories. There were over 4,000 nominations overall for the various categories. The list of nominees was pared down by myself and a team volunteers. For the most part if a site was not nominated it wasn't even considered as a finalist, though in categories with a small number of nominees we had to do some research. In some cases blogs nominated in one category were shifted to other categories we felt were more appropriate. This year we also considered past winners and runner's up in a category even if they weren't nominated.

Q: I nominated XXX, but don't see them as a finalist. Why is XXX not included?

A: Several thousand blogs were nominated. Of the hundreds nominated in each category there's at most 10 up for voting in most categories.

I had volunteers looking at one (or more) categories each. They didn't know which category they would be assigned. Their directions were to look through the nominees and make two lists of 10. Their top ten and a bubble ten. They were allowed to add suggestions, but those had to be marked with stars. I was free to take all, some, or none of their suggestions. I took all those lists, validated them against the category requirements, and in some cases added and removed sites based on my knowledge of each category. The amount of data available to work with consisted of the nominations, some good regionalized blogrolls (on some of the nominees blogs), and the TTLB ecosystem snapshot (for ecosystem based categories). The guideline that blogs would appear in only one category made the process much harder.

You are, of course, free to disagree with the choices I've made, but denigrating the sites selected will not be tolerated. Calling such and such site "stupid", "lame", etc. is a pretty cruel thing to do, especially since many of the sites nominated didn't even know they would be included. If you don't like the choices available don't participate. Better yet resolve to participate IN THE NOMINATION PROCESS next year. Come back here in October 2008, we'll be doing nominations again...

Also it's to late to suggest a site or category that we "missed." I know it might seem helpful, but the polls are the polls.

Q: Can my site be removed from The Weblog Awards poll in the XXX category?

A: Short answer: No.

Long answer: I will not be removing sites from the polls or the listings. Mostly this is due to the time and expense involved in creating the Flash polls. In case you haven't noticed there are a lot of them. The process of building those polls was time consuming and labor intensive - a process no one is eager to revisit. There approximately 490 blogs included as finalists this year in 49 categories (polls), which equals lots of work to put together. Time and money was budgeted to creating the polls, not rebuilding them while we try to run the contest.

Q: But I object to awards and really don't want to participate. Why won't you remove me?

A: See previous answer.

Why do you have a blog? Is not part of the goal of blogging (or podcasting) to build a readership? Can you pick your readers? If so you'll have to share how you are able to selectively choose your readers with the rest of the blogosphere - the rest of us serve our content to readers world-wide without regard to where they come from. If you really want to block access to your site from The Weblog Awards there's technology out their capable of doing that. If that makes you happy, go for it, but you'll still be listed in the poll (for the reasons explained above) for the duration.

Q: How do I contact you via e-mail to complain?

A: kevin at weblogawards dot org

« Last Edit: Nov 3, 2007, 12:21am by Kevin Aylward »