The Weblog Awards

Based on 526,974 votes cast in 45 categories over 8 days of voting in early December 2006, here are the winners of the of The 2006 Weblog Awards:

Nominations for The 2007 Weblog Awards will begin in September 2007, with voting at the end of October 2007, all leading up to the live presentation of The Weblog Awards at the Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas in early November 2007.

Special thanks to all of the volunteers that help with The Weblog Awards. Notable among the many helpers:, Beth, Sadie, Phin, John, Jay, WBAustin, Charlie, Janette, CayuteKitt, Ang, Nathan, Matt, and Blue Star Chronicles. Thanks to all of you! We couldn't put on an event of this magnitude without their help.

Winners should send an e-mail to winners at weblogawards dot org to receive their customized winners logo (please indicate the size you require) and information on obtaining their free admission to the Blog World & New Media Expo. Please indicate the category you won and the name of your site.

Voting for The 2006 Weblog Awards is now closed. There were 526,974 votes cast in 45 categories over the 8 days of voting - two less than last year. Final results will be announced Monday, December 18, 2006.

Nominations for The 2007 Weblog Awards will begin in September 2007, with voting at the end of October 2007, all leading up to the live presentation of The Weblog Awards at the Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas in early November 2007. That's right, there will be a live awards ceremony next year!

To see the polls for The 2006 Weblog Awards follow the links below.

Continue reading "Voting Closes For The 2006 Weblog Awards" »

Today is the last day of voting in The 2006 Weblog Awards. Get out and vote!

I haven't completely totaled up all the numbers yet, but from my estimates it looks like total votes cast will easily top 500,000 votes and could end up closer to one million votes cast. Thanks for making this the biggest and smoothest Weblog Awards yet!

More later...

Today's topic is cheating...

At The Weblog Awards cheaters never prosper, or at least they never prosper for long. There's a reason we state very clearly that results are not final until certified - the reason is we log and inspect everything. We're in the fourth year of this competition and we've seen just about every kind of attempt at cheating, and we've caught and removed them all. This year will probably be no different.

It's also worth noting that to date there have been no verified incidents of cheating. All of the reports we've investigated to this point have not shown any cheating. That could change as we get more reports. If we do find poll where there is cheating, we will note it in the poll, note the number of illegal votes, then remove those votes from the totals.

The rules are very clear... one vote every 24 hours, and we enforce them.

If you're looking for the voting polls, follow this link or scroll down the page.

Today's note concerns one message that only a very, very small percentage of users are seeing. When trying to vote some users are seeing this pop-up message"

Error: Insufficient storage space to run poll.

That's an Adobe Flash setting that needs to be adjusted - one that's outside of our control. Click the "Allow" button and the error message will disappear, and you'll be able to vote in all the polls. You may need to reload your browser session after seeing that message, but most voters will never see this error.

Today's note is about sponsors. You may notice that there are two listed, Blog World & New Media Expo and Wizbang. Those two sites are sponsors because I run the later and am helping out with the former. Neither of those are actual paying sponsors.

How does that relate to The Weblog Awards?

Well it means that, aside from customized site badges for winners, there aren't any "prizes" for winners or finalists. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as the contest is about fun and exposure for all of the participant as opposed to financial glory.

Of course we'd love to give all of the finalists and winners a bushel of prizes, but there's the small problem of the fact that we spend so much time prepping the awards and making sure things run properly we never seem to get around to trying to find prize sponsors.

I mention all of this because I've been contacted by a company about providing a prize for the winner of one specific category. I see no reason to reject a willing prize donor, so I'll finalize that deal on Tuesday.

Although it might be a little too late to make the offer, if you or your company want to sponsor an award for a category (or multiple categories) we're open to your proposals. If accepted we'll note your contribution of prizes on the applicable poll page and forward you the e-mail address of the winner(s).

If you're interested in sponsoring a prize for one or more categories, you can contact me at: sponsors at weblogwards dot org.

Every year the issue of opting out of The Weblog Awards arises, this year is no different...

To answer those questions, I''ll quote directly from The Weblog Awards FAQ

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 500 blogs included as finalists this year in 45 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.

The nomination process began in early November and the finalist selection process took two weeks after that. We even announced the finalist two days before polling started. All during that time we would have worked with sites that didn't want to participate, but arranging this listing is a huge undertaking, especially when you consider that we try to ensure each poll is representative, balanced, and competitive, all the while limiting sites to appearing in one category (with the exception of the Best Blog, Best Podcast, and Video of the Year categories).

At this point no one new is getting into the finalist listings, and no one there is getting out or being moved. It will all be over Friday.

A quick update on yesterday's problems. Due to my travel schedule I wasn't able to babysit the server for most of the day. We did have a MySQL issue where the database wasn't completely releasing resources. After six (or so) hours this would eventually drain server memory to the point that the server would become unresponsive. We've fixed that with a chron script to restart the database occasionally and it seems to resolved the issue.

If you're having issues voting check The Weblog Awards Forum where you can ask questions and look through the FAQ's.

We've received some reports of errors loading polls in the early morning hours. Those issues appear to have been fixed.

The first day of voting is always the most hectic as we are dealing with 10,000 to 20,000 visitors an hour. This will calm down over the weekend which will make the site load faster for everyone. If you're loading a poll over a dial-up modem it can take a few seconds after the page finishes loading for the text to appear in the poll.

Update: We've had some unplanned downtime. We're working on adding an additional database server to help with the load.

Voting for The 2006 Weblog Awards is now open. This is the master list of voting links that you can use this to navigate to the voting booths for each of the 45 categories.

Categories

Best Blog
Best New Blog
Best Individual Blog
Best Humor Blog
Best Comic Strip
Best Online Community
Best Liberal Blog
Best Conservative Blog
Best Centrist Blog

Topic Area Categories

Best Media Blog
Best Technology Blog
Best Sports Blog
Best Military Blog
Best Law Blog
Best Business Blog
Best LGBT Blog
Best Parenting Blog
Best Educational Blog
Best Science Blog
Best Medical/Health Issues Blog

Arts & Letters Categories

Best Photo Blog
Best Culture Blog
Best Diarist
Best Gossip Blog
Best Music Blog
Best Podcast
Best Video Blog
Video Of The Year

International Categories

Best Canadian Blog
Best UK Blog
Best European Blog (Non UK)
Best Asian Blog
Best Middle East or Africa Blog
Best Australia or New Zealand Blog
Best Latino, Caribbean, or South American Blog

TTLB Ecosystem Based Categories

Best of the Top 250 Blogs
Best of the Top 251 - 500 Blogs
Best of the Top 501 - 1000 Blogs
Best of the Top 1001 - 1750 Blogs
Best of the Top 1751 - 2500 Blogs
Best of the Top 2501 - 3500 Blogs
Best of the Top 3501 - 5000 Blogs
Best of the Top 5001 - 6750 Blogs
Best of the Top 6751 - 8750 Blogs
Best of the Rest of the Blogs (8751+)