The Weblog Awards - Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Voting

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Feb 9, 2010, 1:01pm

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The Weblog Awards :: General :: FAQ :: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Voting

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Kevin Aylward
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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Voting
« Thread Started on Dec 7, 2006, 9:00pm »

[Note: This was written last year. The length of the voting period for The 2006 Weblog Awards hasn't been set in stone yet. The maximum will be 10 days; the minumum will be 8 days.]

Today I want to talk about the 10 day voting period.

Some have wondered why the voting period for The Weblog Awards lasts 10 days and why people can vote once a day. Surely, they surmise, it is some evil plot by me to generate massive amounts of traffic, links, and revenue at the expense of the mental sanity of the participants. While I can't speak to the collective mental state of this years finalists at this point in the competition, I can address the length of voting issue.

The reason The Weblog Awards is 10 days and the reason one vote a day is the rule is to level the playing field. I'll admit that I stumbled onto the formula in 2003 while trying to devise a system that would give blogs with lower daily readership a chance against blogs with much higher daily traffic. Call it the InstaPundit influence... I surmised that someone like InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds would probably link to the inaugural edition of the awards only once. If the voting period was one day and he linked to the poll how, I figured, would a site with 1/10th of his daily traffic be able to compete?

The answer, of course, was to extend the voting period and allow for multiple votes, thus giving determined challengers a chance to send members of their smaller audience back to the polls repeatedly in contrast readers from other blogs who might only visit once or twice. The idea behind The Weblog Awards has always been to level the playing field in as many of the categories as possible. That idea is what lead to the creation of the Ecosystem categories. I figured that blogs in proximity to each other in the TTLB Ecosystem would be aligned closely in readership as well - making them natural competition for each other.

I'm fully aware that there are many other ways to conduct the voting. Each year I review and refine the voting (and nomination) process after The Weblog Awards have ended. Perhaps there will be changes next year, but as of now it ain't broke so it doesn't need fixing.