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Post by Kevin Aylward on Dec 7, 2006 21:10:29 GMT -5
The Weblog Awards voting system is set to reject votes from anonymizing services. Our testing indicates software such as Norton Internet Security is not affected, but if you have disabled Flash and/or Javascript you could see errors.
Generally if you are behind an anonymizing proxy you won't even see a poll...
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Post by Kevin Aylward on Dec 8, 2006 22:39:48 GMT -5
Thanks. We're going through the links and fixing them.
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Post by Kevin Aylward on Dec 7, 2006 21:00:02 GMT -5
[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.
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Post by Kevin Aylward on Dec 8, 2006 22:39:03 GMT -5
The "what are the criteria" question is, of course, the hardest of all questions to answer. I'll write more on it this weekend.
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Post by Kevin Aylward on Dec 8, 2006 1:25:18 GMT -5
Just wondering - is my blog nominated for Best Liberal Blog or not? Because it's listed here: 2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_liberal_blog.php, but not in the voting section or the master list. But other blogs seem to think I'm nominated. What's up? The Rude Pundit Check your e-mail - the one you list on your site.
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Post by Kevin Aylward on Dec 7, 2006 20:56:43 GMT -5
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
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