Comments on: SA Blog Awards Need a Better Nomination Process

By: Marie Viljoen

Marie Viljoen — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:10:00 +0000

The voting process has been compromised. Now that you are saying that every 24 hours you can vote again for the same blog you voted for yesterday, the blog that wins is imply the blog that gets the most repeat voters? I refuse to ask that of my readership.

By: Marie Viljoen

Marie Viljoen — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:56:52 +0000

My post below sums up the major issue I had, which was that they listed the wrong url for my blog that made it to the finals...

My second quibble is that now you can vote EVERY 24 hours for the same blog. This is ridiculous. This puts the onus on your readership to hit that button every day, and confirm via an email link. They are already being blasted by awards spam. This alienates the readership, who are the backbone of a blog.

http://66squarefeet.blogspot.com/2010/09/sablog-awards-2010-back-on-track.html

By: Bryan Casson

Bryan Casson — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:25:54 +0000

I would have to say that the expert judges are not very “expert” then as there is almost no relevance for some of the blogs

By: Dave Duarte

Dave Duarte — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:13:35 +0000

I'm involved in organising the blog awards, so I thought i might be useful for me to chip in from an insider's perspective...

Basically, we're aware that the nominations process has some flaws in it. We've been noting everything so that we can fix it up next year. I don't think we'll ever please everyone, but there are certainly some very valid issues for us to resolve. However, while the voting process is cumbersome, we believe the results it gives us are valid - the community of voters determines the categories, and expert judges in the various categories will have weighted votes to add a level of relevance.

This is the first year that the blog awards has a formal management structure (under CEO JP Naude), and we've sought to find venue, media partners, judges, hosts and sponsors that will add to the level of prestige of winning an award.

Ultimately our objective is to acknowledge the best bloggers in SA, provide an incentive and encouragement for more people to aim to be better bloggers in SA, and to raise public awareness of the significance of blogging in the media mix in SA.

By: Amy

Amy — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:02:54 +0000

Thanks for the mention regarding my blog. (www.expandasign.blogspot.com) I'm a blogging newbie and know that, although my content is good, some of the other competitors' templates, imagery, etc is far more advanced. A few barely have any copy, but their blogs are hugely impressive. At the end of the day, I'm not entirely sure what works regarding pulling in more SA Blog Award votes. Cheers

By: Marie

Marie — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:22:04 +0000

One of my blogs – 66 Square Feet (the Food) is a finalist for Photography as well as Overseas. I understood that it had been nominated for Food and Wine, which would make more sense.

My main blog, plain old 66 Square Fete, which gets lots of traffic, and is suited to those categories, didn’t show up, even tough many people told me they nominated it.

I believe SABlogAwards mixed up the urls of my two blogs – which are similar – and listed the wrong blog. Here’s my post about it.

http://66squarefeet.blogspot.com/2010/09/sa-blog-awards-2010-is-anybody-out.html

I have asked them to look into more carefully. and am waiting for a response. I’m happy to have made it into the finals, but concerned about the sloppy mistake I believe they made.

By: Werner Wichmann

Werner Wichmann — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:44:59 +0000

I also agree here. I went through the category listings and most of the blogs I looked at did not seem relevant at all to the category they where listed in.

By: Monty

Monty — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:15:45 +0000

I agree!

Although it's pretty cool that there is an awards competition for blogs, I think the process will probably only be refined in another 3 - 5 years.

A nomination process is a little bit dated to begin with, and there are many other ways to get the info for an awards system... Also, it would be nice to standardise these awards to the same time of the year... This year I missed out getting my blog nominated purely because of the short nomination process and the shift from last year's March/April to this years August/September award dates. Mental note to self, never take a sabbatical!

By: Catherine

Catherine — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:15:05 +0000

Thanks for your vote of confidence *schew* glad to see FD on your list. I really like your blog and I'm surprised you are not through. I have no idea how it all works. I am just happy to get Visual Merchandising onto the marketing map! Keep blogging the good stuff.

By: Robert Bravery

Robert Bravery — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:59:05 +0000

Myscoop is good. But sometimes not as accurate as you might think. Though not entirely their fault.
For example, I don't have a ranking on myscoop purely because I have not embedded their ranking code in my blog. Not a negative sign on their part, but that's just how it is.

Then what if you're not listed on myscoop, does that then mean you should not be ranked?

Ranking sites on the internet is a lot more sophisticated than we might think