Congratulations to all the winners!!!

Have a question about The Weblog Awards? Start with the FAQ. Media requests should be addressed to press at weblogawards dot org.

Are you curious about the nominations or the nomination process? You can find the master list of nomination posts here and peruse the thousands of nominated blogs..

2005 Weblog Award logos and finalist logos here.

In addition to the individual RSS, Atom, and RDF feeds listed in each category, a master OPML file of all finalists (by category) is available. Right click on the link and choose "Save As" to save the OPML file to your computer, then use the file as the source with your newsreaders Import function.

Voting went smoothly this year and casual cheating was all but eliminated. All told there were approximately 445,000 votes cast in the 37 categories this year. As in previous years we have multiple layers of security, with log review the final brick in that wall of security. This year (unlike previous years) there were no automated scripting attacks and there was only minimal deliberate cheating.

We did identify an obscure vulnerability in the polls prior to the start of voting, but we were unable (due to time and technical constraints) to develop an effective fix. Since we were aware of the vulnerability we were not particularly surprised when a handful of technically adept folks finally discovered it. Their votes were removed and they were banned from the domain as we found them.

Hang tight for final results and thanks for your participation and support.

There's a couple more hours left for voting - get to it!

Of course there's been lots of e-mail to read and polls to look at. There's less than 48 hours to the finish line at which time my real work starts. Remember the vote is not official until all the polls have been reviewed. I personally check the logs of every poll for cheating and make adjustments as needed. Some of the work has already begun, and I checkpoint the logs as I do early reviews on them.

In regards to vote removal, I've decided only to officially not the larger vote removals. Smaller (less than 100) removals will still be made, just not publicly noted. I keep a record of all of the vote changes, so you can contact me at kevin at weblogawards dot org if you have a question about poll anomalies.

Keep the votes coming!

First the Best Asian Blog was hit by repeated voting due to a device used at a Singapore ISP. The device is not intended for use in The Weblog Awards, if just so happens to make a nice jump point for cheating. Votes skyrocketed, addresses were banned, votes were removed, etc. Thing are back to working again, but it leaves us with a dilemma. Banning the device leaves a large section of Singapore users unable to vote. That's a problem that I'm working on.

In other news, we had no idea banning IP addresses could be so controversial. Previously we'd made a point of identifying IP addresses banned, but a helpful reader pointed out that in some parts of the world with repressive regimes such information could be used to identify and punish individuals. In some of those countries you most assuredly do not want to run afoul of the government.

Needless to say publication of IP addresses that have been banned won't be occurring anymore. The IP addresses will still be banned, but the individual addresses banned will not be published.

And finally there's been some question about what we mean by "Polls close December 15, 2005." That means that the polls will close at 11:59 PM (US - Eastern) December 15, 2005 - give or take a few minutes since each poll must be closed individually .

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.

Nominations, on the other hand, are due for a major overhaul.

Several e-mailers, in the course of thanking me (which is sincerely appreciated) for the thankless job of organizing this contest have noted sentiment similar to this, "I have discovered so many great new sites by visiting the finalists!"

Busted! The dirty little secret of The Weblog Awards is that it's not really about who wins, it's increasing exposure for all of the blogs in The Weblog Awards. Every year I get messages about people finding new sites via The Weblog Awards. At the end of the day that's the real benefit of the whole thing.

Newsroom Coming Soon

Are you blogging about the results of the various polls? If so visit this post at Wizbang and find out how you can become one of the authors in the forthcoming Weblog Awards Newsroom. Starting this weekend we'll be crafting press releases recapping the competition, and the next one could feature you!

Cheaters Never Prosper

We've had our first deductions for cheating in the Best Blog Design category. Oddly it's not on behalf of the leaders in the category. The changes are listed in the Summary Of Poll Changes and noted on the poll page. Please note that there is no inference that the affected blogs have anything to do with the voters banned for cheating.

Tag: Weblog Awards

First we're nearing completion of the task of adding RSS or Atom feeds (depending on the blog) to the listings for every poll. So far we've found only a handful of blogs with no discernible feed of one flavor or another. The last task in the RSS'ification project will be to create an OPML file of all the finalists that you can importing into most newsreaders and online feed readers.

In other topics the number of reported errors have dropped to a trickle. The FAQ has been updated with additional details for commonly reported errors.

More updates this evening...

Tag: Weblog Awards

First up, poll lockouts. From my response in the support thread (with clarity edits):

OK here's the deal. We never trusted users local time, since sooner or later they would have figured out to set their clocks back and vote again... We use the server time.

The server time (due to full hardware replacement Monday) was mistakenly set to what I'm pretty sure was GMT. That puts it 5 hours ahead of the time on the old server (EDT), and I didn't catch it until Tuesday evening. Now that the time has been changed to the proper time zone on the server there's a 29 hour lockout for SOME people - JUST FOR TODAY. New voters aren't subject to it at all. Both Pete and I have tested this and the polls do appear to unlock at the 29 hour mark.

We're not talking votes, just the time stamps locking people out from voting. As a result of the upgrade, everyone gets new 24 clocks on every poll. Again I'm not sure if it was absolutely necessary, but the boatloads of panicked e-mails indicate that it was an issue to those who have already voted. I want to error to the side of inclusion rather than exclusion, so the change was made.

Next up, RSS/Atom feeds. Have a look at the Best Blog or Best Group Blog categories and you'll see feed icons next to the finalists. Kind of cool, huh?

I'd like to get feed links on every category page, but to do so I need some help. If you've got a few minutes to spare drop me a line at kevin at weblogawards dot org and I'll send you the formats I need and the category to work on. It's mostly a cut and past work, with a little bit of sleuthing (since some sites don't prominently identify their feeds) mixed in. Don't bother sending me individual sites feed links, I need entire categories. If you're up for that challenge see below for examples of the exact styling I need.

Feeds should be listed in the following order of preference: RSS, Atom, RDF. If a site has RSS use that. Blogspot sites typically have only Atom. Here's an example of the exact formatting of the code I need.

Example of a RSS feed (Captain's Quarters):

<a href="http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/index.xml"><img alt="Subscribe to RSS feed" src="http://weblogawards.org/images/rss.gif" width="36" height="14" /></a>  

Example of an Atom feed (The Huffington Post):

<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/full_atom.xml"><img alt="Subscribe to Atom feed" src="http://weblogawards.org/images/atom.gif" width="36" height="14" /></a>  

Example of a RDF feed for (Kevin Drum's Political Animal at Washington Monthly):

<a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/index.rdf"><img alt="Subscribe to RDF/RSS 1.0 feed" src="http://weblogawards.org/images/rdf.gif" width="36" height="14" /></a>  

All you need to do is copy the three samples and paste in the feed link to all 15 entrants, using the correct format (RSS, Atom, RDF). If a site has no feed, just put NONE on that line. Notice that the site name and link aren't required as that information is already in the page.

Are you up for the challenge?

Tag: Weblog Awards

And on a less serious topic: The rumor is not true - the top prize is not a lifetime suply of ramen, though if a ramen company want to get on board as a sponsor perhaps that can be arranged...

We get hate mail about The Weblog Awards. Rather than obsess over them (which I don't), I'm just going to publicize the oddest or wackiest of them. Here's one of my personal favorites:

Are you that prick or condescending not to answer at all?

This year, I checked the list -- not again, it is all hearies. There are hundreds of deaf bloggers and yet you do not have a category for them, why is that?

I'm still waiting for your response regarding the discrimination towards Deaf bloggers. My blog has ranked No. 1 in the Deaf Community for the last two years, and I do not see anything that focused on a group from your so-called WEBLOG AWARDS.

Are you so fucking hearie elitists?

To which I responded, "Nor do we include awards for pet bloggers, music blogs, autism blogs, porn blogs, etc. I'll tell you what I told them. If you're so pissed off about not being included do something about it - start your own awards. There's your response."

Evidently I struck a nerve.

So you actually compared deaf bloggers to these people? If you got BEST GLBT Blog, it is fucking subculture thing. What about Deaf Culture -- it is not fucking subculture!

Jesus Christ!

You're typical stupid Hearie Prick

More in tomorrow's Weblog Awards Notes...

Tag: Weblog Awards

The following e-mail exchanges with the NOC that hosts this server indicate just how painful Monday was...

There may or may not be complications in regards to the RAM upgrade. Engineers are looking into it now.

We are replacing all hardware on the server. There appeared to be problems with multiple parts.

Full hardware swap. Server coming up well now. It's going back on the rack and should be up for good in about 5 minutes.

To mitigate the chances of high server load (which doesn't appear to be an issue anymore) I have opened a comment thread at Wizbang to handle your support or technical questions - rather than hosting it here.

Fixed: We became aware that some sites with longer names were obscuring their vote total display. All of these names have been shortened so that their totals now display properly. The actual vote totals were not affected, just the display of the total.

Tag: Weblog Awards

All polls are scrubbed during and after the contest for excess voting. Changes are noted below. To reduce the number of entries in this listing, only adjustments of more than 100 votes have totals listed. Other smaller adjustments will continue to be made and noted. We hold a record of all such changes for affected parties to review, if desired. Changes are listed in the order in which they were made; with the most recent changes appearing at the top of the list.

Best of the Top 5001 - 6750 Blogs

In addition to the change noted previously, the total votes for The Hole Card have been further reduced by 131 votes for for excessive voting from a handful of IP address.

In addition to the change noted previously, the total votes for Mazurland Blog have been further reduced by 108 votes for for excessive voting from a single IP address.

Best Humor/Comics Blog

The total votes for Dilbert have been reduced by 9615 votes for for excessive voting from two IP address.

Best Group Blog

The total votes for Hit and Run have been reduced by 1440 votes for for excessive voting from three IP address.

In addition, minor adjustments were made to Pandagon to remove excess voting.

Best of the Top 5001 - 6750 Blogs

The total votes for The Hole Card have been reduced by 156 votes for for excessive voting from five IP address.

The total votes for Mazurland Blog have been reduced by 105 votes for for excessive voting from three IP addresses.

In addition, minor adjustments were made to Random Yak to remove excess voting.

Best Blog

Minor adjustments (i.e. less than 100 votes) were made to the totals of Daily Kos to remove excess voting.

Best Sports Blog

The total votes for Athletics Nation have been reduced by 3588 votes for for excessive voting from a variety of IP addresses.

The total votes for Blue Gray Sky have been reduced by 174 votes for for excessive voting from three individual IP addresses.

Best LGBT Blog

The total votes for Brat Boy School have been reduced by 160 votes for for excessive voting from five individual IP addresses.

In addition, minor adjustments were made to the totals of Shades of Gray, Pam's House Blend, and Towel Road to remove excess voting.

Best Asian Blog

The total votes for Xiaxue have been reduced by 5048 votes for for excessive voting from the 220.255 subnet. Nine individual IP addresses have been banned.

The total votes for Mr. Brown have been reduced by 9944 votes for for excessive voting from the 218.186 subnet. Three individual IP addresses have been banned.

Best Middle East or Africa Blog

The total votes for Regime Change Iran have been reduced by 572 votes for for excessive voting from a single IP address.

The total votes for This is Zimbabwe have been reduced by 305 votes for for excessive voting from a variety of IP addresses.

In addition, minor adjustments were made 6000 miles from civilisation to remove excess voting.

Best Blog Design

Minor adjustments were made to Mom2Mom Connection and Coming Anarchy to remove excess voting.

Per the rules, all of the IP addresses identified for excessive voting have been banned from the site completely. Their access will be reinstated Dec. 16th. Site owners may contact me at kevin at weblogawards dot org if they would like a copy of the logs used to identify the for excessive voting.

It's important to point out (again) that the blogs that have had votes removed are NOT cheating. They are simply the unfortunate recipients of some overzealous voters who were attempting to game the results.

Tag: Weblog Awards

Fun!

The 2005 Weblog Awards continue the traditions of the previous two 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 (over 550 this year) versus the same couple blogs over and over. Blogs are generally limited to appearing as finalists in one category (though they may also appear in the design or podcasting category), ensuring that the same blog doesn't sweep the awards from top to bottom. The Weblog Awards is about expanding your blog reading horizons by exploring the hundreds of finalists you may not be familiar with.

Q: Who can vote?

A: Anyone. You must have Macromedia Flash version 7 (or greater) installed 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: I can't vote with Firefox. The system has some error message I don't understand. Can you help?

A: We've receive a single report of this so it's unknown how widespread the problem is. Using IE allowed the user to vote. We've tested the polls with Firefox 1.0 and 1.5 and had no problems, but it is possible that a Firefox extension the user had installed was preventing Flash from working properly.

Q: It's been over 24 hours and I can't vote again. Can you help?

A: Not that we doubt your memory, but are you sure about that? There was an issue isolated mostly to day 2 (Tuesday Dec. 6) related to a server hardware failure which might have affected a few folks for a few hours. That issue cleared itself up auto-magically. Other than that minor blip (which was isolated) things appear to be working fine. See this entry in The Weblog Awards Notes for a full discussion.

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: 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 certified.

Q: What about cheaters?

A: 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

Q: Why are the comments "unmonitored?"

A: Because I don't have time to monitor them. I did want to give a people a small forum to discuss polls, the awards, etc. and the Haloscan hosted comment service was good way to do that.

Q: How were finalist picked?

A: To understand how 15 finalists were picked in each category you first have to understand how they were nominated. There was a call for nominations early in November for all of the categories. There were on the order of 3000 nominations for the various categories. The list of nominees was pared down to 15 by me 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. For everyone who complains that we "missed" one site or another, my question to you is, "did you nominate them?" We don't have ESP here at the Weblog Awards, though I'm looking into that for next year...

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 15 up for voting.

I had volunteers looking at 2 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 "shitty", "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 November 2006, we'll be doing nominations again, just like the last 3 years.

Also it's to late to suggest a site that we "missed." I know it might seem helpful, but the polls are the polls.

Q: No offense, but who picked the Best Blog Design? Those are not the best designs... XXX and YYY are much better.

A: See the previous entry. Offense taken. There is some debate going on about what constitutes "good" or "best" design, but throwing backhanded insults at the finalists is not a good way to enter the debate.

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 550 blogs included as finalists this year in 37 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

Tag: Weblog Awards

You can still use the Unmoderated Comments try to talk about the polls and possibly get help from other users...

Tag: Weblog Awards