It is with a great deal of regret that I must inform everyone that The 2009 Weblog Awards are canceled.

Unfortunately the resources required to handle the load of voting (nearly 1,000,000 votes in 2008) could not be adequately provisioned. Even if the servers and bandwidth required appeared today it would be at least a few weeks before everything could be ready for voting.

This has always been a very, very labor intensive process, and in recent years with our success a very expensive competition to run. It's hard to have unlimited resources provisioned for seven days of voting. In the past we've had to provision expensive servers for several months to prepare for the crush of voting.

We really tried to solve the resource problems with new ideas (such as cloud computing) this year, but ultimately we were not able to make things work to our satisfaction. I'm very proud of the voting platform we built for The Weblog Awards over the years, and the quality voting experience we've been able to deliver. The one thing I will not do is compromise that voting experience.

Rather than run a competition that had a high possibility of technically failing, the more prudent choice seemed to be regroup and consider our alternatives for hosting these awards going forward.

Thank you to those who have supported The Weblog Awards over the years, we appreciate your support, and our sorry we couldn't make things work this year.

We've extended the nomination period until Sunday. There's over 3,000 nominations already, but there's always room for more!

Spread the word, and nominate you favorite sites.

Time is running out...

Update: Nominations are closed for all categories except for the following:

Best Celebrity Twitterer, Best Technology Blog, Best Military/Gun Blog, Best Business Blog, Best Medical/Health Issues Blog, Best Pet Blog, Best Literature Blog, Best Travel Blog, Best Gossip Blog, Best Asian Blog, Best Latino/South American Blog, Best Midsize Blog (Authority between 201 and 300), Best Up and Coming Blog (Authority between 51 and 100)

Nominations for these categories will close at some point this week...

The 2009 Weblog Awards are the world's largest blog competition. The 2009 edition is now fully underway.

The nomination process for The 2009 Weblog Awards began today and will run through November 20, 2009 November 22, 2009.

Click here to see the master list of categories where you can nominate your favorite blogs. Get site badges (with linking code), and learn how you can get involved in this year's festivities.

The schedule for The 2009 Weblog Awards is as follows:

Nominations Nov. 3, 2009 - Nov. 20, 2009
Finalists Announced December 28, 2009
Voting January 4, 2010 - January 11, 2009

Start nominating your favorite sites, and start spreading the word about nominations opening!

After a full day of doing battle with Javascript, JQuery, and Apache, we've finally got things straightened out. For a large period of the day the site wouldn't accept comments from Firefox or Google Chrome (but worked with IE8), which obviously wasn't acceptable for our famous open nomination process. We've solved that issue, and the + ratings issue. Big thanks to Mark Carey and Bryne Reese for the help.

All this means we will open nominations later this evening.

There's still some minor housekeeping we're working on (such as the content of the site ads, the Technorati Authority boundaries, etc.), but as soon as that's finished nominations will open.

We've solved nearly all of the techincal issues we were having with the comment system, save for one - the function that allows folks to issue a + vote to existing comments, which helps us eliminate duplicate comments. Basically there's a colliding AJAX function between the commenting code and the rating plugin. We've called on some really smart folks to help us try and patch a fix in either system, they just need a little time to examine the error.

This has always been a popular feature and we want to take another day to try to get it working. Everything else is set to roll. The nomination posts where you leave your nominating comments are all built and ready to publish.

We're launching nominations November 3, 2009 whether we get the + vote feature working or not, but we're going to do everything possible to get it working tomorrow.

Sorry about the delay, but the only way we can even attempt this work is without all the traffic of nomination comments.

In the meantime you can grab your Weblog Awards logos and read the nomination FAQ.

We've had to move the start of nominations to Monday, November 2, 2009 due to some techincal issues that we're having with our comment system. The comment system is working, but the feature that allows you to add +'s to other comments is not yet working. It's nothing major, but we'll be working on things over the weekend.

In the meantime we've released The Weblog Awards logos. Go get them!

If you need to contact us leave a comment (it will help us identify any issues) or just send an e-mail to kevin at the weblogawards dot org...