Third Annual Blog Award Vote Totals

As others have noted, the blog award voting has opened and the votes are rolling in. The threshold has been broken and the vote totals are now being revealed.

Good luck to all our nominees!

Third Annual Blog Award Countdown

The countdown to the opening of the voting for the Third Annual UU Blog Awards has begun. Last year opening and closing the voting period was a manual process making it hard to communicate a time (had an issue with nominations for this year as well). I wasn't sure when I would be sitting there ready to go. So this year the timing is all automated. Oh, and some folks liked watching the vote totals rise, others wanted mystery. This year we will have a little of both. Votes will remain hidden until at least 5 people have submitted their votes, then they will be displayed until a few hours before voting closes. They will remain hidden until the winners are revealed.

I will probably still put an announcement out on Monday, but the voting will open automatically.

So, one weekend and then a week left to read the nominations. Good luck to all our nominees!

Third Annual Blog Award Nominations Closed

Nominations are closed so we have the final list of nominees for the Third Annual UU Blog Awards. Congratulations to all who have been nominated, and thanks to those who participated. In particular a personal thanks for those who had the time and inclination to make things easier for me to compile the results. It helped. If you don't see a nomination you submitted let me know.

First I would like to run through some of the comments I received:

I'm confused, but I hope you understand what I am nominating. It was an important sermon.

I got confused on some of these as well. I hope people take a look at the above list and help me to figure out what some of these nominations reference. Hopefully with some more eyes looking it over we will figure it out.

It would be nice to have the option to choose more than one in the drop down menus - nominations need to be a broader net than voting for one site in each category, and it's a pain to submit this form more than once.

I feel your pain. I actually set it up that way last year, but people seemed confused (maybe this years didn't help) and wrote in nominations more often than not. The process is evolving, it's my second shot at it, and next year I think I will switch back to the multi selects. Thanks for the constructive criticism and dealing with the pain!

Maybe next year there could be a social justice category of some sort? Meanwhile, I nominate you (uupdates.net) for the best aggregator or blog network award.

That does sound like a good category. I will note it for next year. I appreciate the comment on UUpdates, and constructive criticism for that is welcome as well. Also, many thanks to those who have helped keep UUpdates up to date by letting me know about new blogs or sites of interest. Without the people letting me know about all the great new resources they may not have been added. And of course thanks for the great content. It's aggregation, it would be nothing without the content it's aggregating.

Gosh, this seems like a lot of work! Thank you for doing this!

Your welcome, I learn a lot from doing this and I think it means a lot to some folks. So that makes it worthwhile to me. Also, there is some manual process involved and it is entirely possible something got missed between the raw data and the formatted results I posted. If something is missing let me know.

Do the blogs with the most number of nominations (like the top five) make it to the voting round, or do all blogs with nominations move on? It seems like that could get crowded if all blogs that are nominated move on.... Just a thought.

It's a great thought! I agree that voting might be difficult with to many nominees on the ballot. For some categories it might be pretty easy to trim down to five, for others the question would be what to do when we didn't get multiple nominations, but rather a bunch of single nominations. So, please leave your thoughts and comments! What do we do here folks? Keep only the top five, more for ties? Not many single posts got multiple nominations.

I may not respond right away, I have a little trip this weekend. Please keep the conversation rolling. What to do with the nominees? Can you figure out the posts? Perhaps a link to the comments?

Third Annual Blog Award Nominations

I received the following comment through the blog award comment box:

Do the blogs with the most number of nominations (like the top five) make it to the voting round, or do all blogs with nominations move on? It seems like that could get crowded if all blogs that are nominated move on.... Just a thought.

In brief, my plan is to post the list of nominations then ask for feedback regarding which nominations should actually get carried into the voting. I expect we will have some blogs nominated in the inappropriate category, etc. A lot under some categories, etc. Based on previous years input a run-off to get the nominations down to the top 5 does make sense. I will be keeping track of the number of times a blog is nominated, and I can report that.

So, hopefully I will be capturing enough information, if not maybe we can do some sort of run off. And, as far as the process to be followed, I will not be deciding myself. i will be posing the questions here and looking for feedback.

Nominations Open for Third Annual blog Awards

Nominations are open for the Third Annual blog Awards. If you have any questions about thepage, process, etc. feel free to comment here or send an e-mail.

Third Annual Blog Award Categories

The more categories the more chances for people to feel appreciated, and the more to promote. So, I am planning on opening nominations for the following categories next Monday based on comments and recommendations. Hopefully the list did not get to overwhelmingly large. And if we don't get any nominations in a category, well I suppose we can drop it. Oh, I also tried to group the categories. So here they are.

Nominations for single entries (posts) or series of posts:

• Best Religious Writing or Theological Commentary - Single entry
• Best Review or Cultural Commentary - Single entry
• Best Anecdote or Narrative - Single entry
• Best Political Commentary - Single entry

Nominations for a blog's elements aside from posts:

• Best Design or Use of Visuals - Blog
• Best Links - Blog

Nominations for a blog's collective writings for the year:

• Best Religious Writing or Theological Commentary - Best of class
• Best Anecdote or Narrative - Best of class
• Best Political Commentary - Best of class
• Best New blog - Blog
• Best Online Community or Group Blog - Blog
• Best Non-UU-Themed Blog - Blog
• Best UU-Themed Blog - Blog
• Best Minister blog - Blog
• Best Seminarian blog - Blog
• Best Lay blog - Blog
• Best Writing - Blog

The Second Annual included 11 Awards, so we are up to 17 this year. Please comment or suggest, these need to be final by the time nominations begin.

Third Annual Blog Award Schedule

The Schedule for the Third Annual UU Blog Awards will be as follows:

• January 10th Announce Categories
• Nominations from January 15th through the 19th
• Post Nominations and finalize nominees
  
• Voting from January 29th through February 2nd
• Winners finalized and posted
  

So, today (in a little while) I will post the categories based on prior suggestions. These will be the final categories heading into nominations on the 15th.

Nominations - last year I was thinking the 5 most nominated would be good for the vote off, but then we had only a few with multiple nominations and a lot with one so it didn't seem a good way to try and determine the final nominations. So my plan for this year is to post the nominations and ask for input on finalizing the nominees. So, for example if a particular blogger gets a bunch of nominations in a single category it can be reduced to one entry (no splitting your own votes), or ones can be removed, since they are not actually appropriate to the category they were nominated in.

Voting - once the nominees have been finalized everyone following the process should have also had a full week to read up on entries they missed. The vote tallies roll in and soon we have our winners.

Winners - last year I think I took down the voting tally display right at the end. i took some time at the last minute to validate that no "fishy" activity occurred then posted the final results.

So folks, that the plan. Shout outs from folks interested/excited that this is happening would be appreciated (in other words comment with a "Woot!").

Blog Awards

So, I am assuming, and hoping there is interest in running the UU blog awards this year? I took a quick look at some other blog awards and found that different groups had very different ways of running their awards. So, I couldn't really figure out a "best of practice" for running the awards.

One thing I did like is the idea of having a panel of judges. Last year I made some decisions and basically said things like "So... since an individual blog was nominated for best 'Group Blog' anyone mind if I simply throw out the nomination?". Having gotten no objections I proceeded with my best guess. A group of people deciding seems more appropriate.

One thing I would like to get some feedback on prior to any nominations is what people think of various categories.

Last years Awards:

• Best Religious Writing or Theological Commentary - Single entry
• Best Religious Writing or Theological Commentary - Best of class
• Best Review or Cultural Commentary
• Best Anecdote or Narrative - Single entry
• Best Anecdote or Narrative - Best of class
• Best Design or Use of Visuals
• Best Links
• Best Writing
• Best Online Community or Group Blog
• Best Non-UU-Themed Blog
• Best UU-Themed Blog

Other suggested categories include:

• Foreign language (though it would be hard to judge).
• Best new blog?
• Best political commentary?
• Best minister blog?
• Best lay blog?
  

One of the reasons I was thinking a panel of judges might be useful is to help with some suggested changes. For example CC suggested that it might be nice for a blogger to not have 5 different choices in a category for best post. So perhaps the blogger, or the panel, etc. could pick one nomination. Someone also suggested the number of nominations per category to limit the amount of material to read. We could do this based on number of nominations, but that would almost seem to be a "pre vote" making the final votes a run off. But maybe that's the idea.

Suggestions? Volunteers? Comments? Opinions?

Anyone care to right up a description of the Blog Categories?