Finalists Announced!

[Kevin Aylward]

Here's the link to the full list:

2008.weblogawards.org/site-news/2008-weblog-awards-finalists/

Enjoy!

[blacknright]

Congratulations to all the finalists but you guys have to do better with nominations next year. Trying to find me was too confusing, so people didn't bother. What you need to do is have a database or other list generating software where people can nominate the names and have it come out alphabetically and then people won't renominate the same people over and over and people can find those they want to nominate more easily. That makes it alot more fair to everyone involved. But I am genuinely happy for those who were able to garner nominations at all since it was so confusing! See you around the blogosphere!

BNR
www.blacknright.wordpress.com

[actor212]

Kevin, I suck at clock math.

What time on Monday will voting begin?

[Kevin Aylward]

If I knew I'd tell you :-)

The thing is I have to build 48 polls, which takes time. I can't really estimate how much time that will take.

Not to worry though you can vote once every 24 hours, so any time you visit Monday will be fine.

[Kevin Aylward]

Jan 2, 2009 5:39:11 GMT -5 blacknright said:

Congratulations to all the finalists but you guys have to do better with nominations next year. Trying to find me was too confusing, so people didn't bother. What you need to do is have a database or other list generating software where people can nominate the names and have it come out alphabetically and then people won't renominate the same people over and over and people can find those they want to nominate more easily. That makes it alot more fair to everyone involved. But I am genuinely happy for those who were able to garner nominations at all since it was so confusing! See you around the blogosphere!

BNR
www.blacknright.wordpress.com

That is on our "to-do" list. The comment system used for nominations is easy and open, but it doesn't drive as much traffic to the nominees as we'd like.

The way we present the finalist in the polls really does drive traffic and RSS subscriptions, which is really the goal of the whole operation. We'd like the nomination process to drive traffic to the nominated blogs as well. Hopefully we can come up with a system like you describe for next year.

[RennyBA]

Of course its an honour to be a finalist for the second year in the row. You guys are doing a terrific job and I'm looking forward to this years competition of course.

On thing is winning or not - another is to expand your network in Blogsphere and meet new friends. Last year that in itself was a boost for me.

Btw: I've heard that it might be possible to have the vote scheme on my blog (for my category) this year - true?

[Kevin Aylward]

True.

Sign up for the Weblog Awards News mailing list (link on the main site), because we'll be sending details to that list. We'll also post instructions on the poll page. We're looking at rolling this out Tuesday or Wednesday, so we can gauge the overall system load.

[exile]

The clock says that voting will start at midnight on Monday, so Tuesday will be the start of the vote? So why are we being told on this thread that Monday is the day?

Is it so difficult to set dates for everything and then stick to them? The voting days were supposed to start on the 2nd and finish on the 10th, Then they were shifted to the 5th - 12th, and now it seems to be the 6th - 12th.

I do hope that arses will sting when all this is over.

[Matt D]

Jan 4, 2009 2:01:33 GMT -5 exile said:

The clock says that voting will start at midnight on Monday, so Tuesday will be the start of the vote? So why are we being told on this thread that Monday is the day?

Is it so difficult to set dates for everything and then stick to them? The voting days were supposed to start on the 2nd and finish on the 10th, Then they were shifted to the 5th - 12th, and now it seems to be the 6th - 12th.

I do hope that arses will sting when all this is over.

From the weblogawards Twitter feed: (http://twitter.com/weblogawards)

That countdown clock is just a stock widget. Right now I expect voting to open early Monday morning, + or .- a few hours

I'm sure that Kevin's arse stings plenty from all the time he's spent on it trying to pull everything together.

[tywkiwdbi]

As a "new blog" candidate, I hope I will be forgiven for asking some newbie-level questions.
1) If several members of a family wish to vote but have just one computer, I presume they will only be able to cast one vote; there presumably won't be a way for people to "log on" with identities for voting - there will essentially be one vote per computer per category?

2) Conversely if my wife and I vote with different computers from the same home address, I assume your tracking software will recognize that as two votes and not think someone is cheating by voting twice?

3) I'll find the answer to this in a day or two, but I'm curious... will the voting page show running totals of votes cast, or will the vote totals be suppressed until the voting period ends?

4) I've not been able to find a "link code" for my visitors to use to get to the voting pages. I have placed one of the badges on my sidebar. I think I can modify the code of the badge so that it takes people to the category I'm in. Is that the way we need to do it? And from that category voting page will visitors be able to click out to a main page to enter votes in other categories, or should I provide a link for that purpose?

Thanks in advance for any answers

Minnesotastan/TYWKIWDBI

[exile]

It is just a stock widget? Then why in the name of God's left ball was it installed? Just to confuse everyone?

OK, this is a really simple question and I can't understand why a really simple answer cannot be given: at what exact time will voting start?

[Kevin Aylward]

Because there are 48 seperate polls to build and activate. We had to make a tweak to the code this morning and I had to manually update 48 seperate pages to add the poll code to them. All that takes time. I updated status when I could and polls did open on the 5th.

[Sean Gleeson]

Jan 4, 2009 21:16:52 GMT -5 tywkiwdbi said:

As a "new blog" candidate, I hope I will be forgiven for asking some newbie-level questions.
1) If several members of a family wish to vote but have just one computer, I presume they will only be able to cast one vote; there presumably won't be a way for people to "log on" with identities for voting - there will essentially be one vote per computer per category?

2) Conversely if my wife and I vote with different computers from the same home address, I assume your tracking software will recognize that as two votes and not think someone is cheating by voting twice?

3) I'll find the answer to this in a day or two, but I'm curious... will the voting page show running totals of votes cast, or will the vote totals be suppressed until the voting period ends?

4) I've not been able to find a "link code" for my visitors to use to get to the voting pages. I have placed one of the badges on my sidebar. I think I can modify the code of the badge so that it takes people to the category I'm in. Is that the way we need to do it? And from that category voting page will visitors be able to click out to a main page to enter votes in other categories, or should I provide a link for that purpose?

Thanks in advance for any answers

Minnesotastan/TYWKIWDBI

Good questions! I'll answer them.

1) Yes! Only one vote per computer per day, even if you have multiple family members on this machine. There is no procedure to log in as a different user.

2) Right! Different persons may use separate computers to cast their separate votes.
(But as per Kevin's note on the site, try to avoid casting those votes simultaneously if they are coming from the same IP address 2008.weblogawards.org/notes/daily-notes---january-5/ )

3) Running totals are shown. Much more exciting that way!

4) Sure you can link to your own category page, that's probably the best way to drive votes for your blog. And the link for the directory of all the polls is 2008.weblogawards.org/polls/

[Kevin Aylward]

Jan 4, 2009 21:16:52 GMT -5 tywkiwdbi said:

As a "new blog" candidate, I hope I will be forgiven for asking some newbie-level questions.
1) If several members of a family wish to vote but have just one computer, I presume they will only be able to cast one vote; there presumably won't be a way for people to "log on" with identities for voting - there will essentially be one vote per computer per category?

2) Conversely if my wife and I vote with different computers from the same home address, I assume your tracking software will recognize that as two votes and not think someone is cheating by voting twice?

3) I'll find the answer to this in a day or two, but I'm curious... will the voting page show running totals of votes cast, or will the vote totals be suppressed until the voting period ends?

4) I've not been able to find a "link code" for my visitors to use to get to the voting pages. I have placed one of the badges on my sidebar. I think I can modify the code of the badge so that it takes people to the category I'm in. Is that the way we need to do it? And from that category voting page will visitors be able to click out to a main page to enter votes in other categories, or should I provide a link for that purpose?

Thanks in advance for any answers

Minnesotastan/TYWKIWDBI

1) Honestly I don't remember. I think if they each have their own user account they can each cast a vote. See the Daily Notes - Jan. 5 for information on multiple votes from the same machine or network. Basically if you try and stuff votes one after another it's going to counter that. Spead your families voting out and you'll be fine.

2) Yes. The only restriction is that you can't cast the same votes on both machines within a short period of time of each other. In that case it looks like it's a spamming attack and would kick in with fraud supression.

3) The vote totally are real-time.

4) You've got the right idea. Just link to your poll page. Every poll page has a link to the master navigation page.

[rubyhoney]

Kev,

Thanks for including me in the list of diarists- I just found out about it today.

The rose city journal link in the list of finalists doesn't go to my blog. It goes to a different site. The link should be: www.rosecityjournal.com/

I gather your group is pretty busy so don't know if you'll have time to fix, but wanted to let you know.

thanks again for including me!

Lisa