While I’ve never actually entered the blog awards before, this year I decided to enter my podcast (www.thedigitaledge.co.za) into the awards. I think the actual concept for the awards is awesome but I do have a slight issue with the way they are run. Here’s my two cents:
So the way it works is that there are two phases. The first is a nomination phase where everyone sends in their votes and then secondly there is a voting phases once there is a top 10 (or some arb number. I made 10 up) for the actual category winner. Sounds innocent enough right? You’d be wrong!
So when you go to the website (http://www.sablogawards.com/2009/) and try enter a blog in a category (like say for example The Digital Edge for best Podcast) you get greeted with a response saying that you need to nominate three categories or else you cannot cast your vote. This brings me to my first complaint: how the hell am I going to get octogenarians such as my grandparents to vote for their favourite grandson if they have to enter two other blogs? I mean it’s okay for people who want to enter their blog into multiple categories but it’s pretty silly if you have a Podcast (such as www.thedigitaledge.co.za) and want to just vote in that category. The three categories voting thing is just silly.
This brings me onto my second point! You can create a cool badge to put on your site by simply putting in your blog address and choosing the categories you want to people to nominate you for. Now this is awesome but this brings us back to the first issue of having to need to nominate yourself for three categories. If you click on the badge at the top of this post you’ll notice that I have it setup for www.thedigitaledge.co.za with best podcast and two other random categories. There’s no way to choose three different blogs and nominate them for three different categories when creating the badge.
Ultimately I’m looking forward to crushing the other Podcast contestants and will be starting an awesome campaign sooner than later but these issues are just creating a very user unfriendly entrance situation. You live and you learn so hopefully these mistakes won’t happen again next year.
PS: This is a relatively subtle attempt to get you to nominate my Podcast so click on the badge at the top of the post and nominate us for Podcast of the year and the two other categories I randomly chose.
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