Before tomorrow and the start of a new round of Blog of the Weeks, I just wanted to recap the first ever Bloggers Choice awards which clued up just last week:
- Due to heavy promotion by the blog owners in the first round, an explosion of traffic came to this site resulting in thousands of votes. It was complete madness, in fact. With over 550 comments posted in the vote thread and 4800 votes cast via the Poll, I was completely blown away by the response.
- 'The Maintream Media' caught wind of the initiative and thought it interesting enough to talk about. I was on the Morning Show with Jeff Gilhooly, had a wonderful article by Kerri Breen published in The Telegram and was interviewed by Angela Antle of CBC's Weekend Arts Magazine who provided me with a link to a podcast of our talk.
- And of course two blogs won and those are again John Gushue... Dot, Dot, Dot and Bitstop. Congrats! Bravo.
- Instead of 10 blogs per round, I will up the total to 16. I did not want to saturate everything by going every 2 and a half months, PLUS I wanted to give more exposure to those that are voted the winners each round.
- With that thought, I'll also be inviting the winners to add exclusive content monthly to the hub here, with links back to their blogs of course. This is in effort to add a little more value to the NL Bloggers Choice Award.
- Voting will change as well. Instead of just a 2 fold system of poll votes and comment votes, I'm going to add further complexity to it all. The poll votes will remain the same, but the change comes with regards to how comments are valued. It'll now be a 3 fold system within itself:
- Anonymous posting will be worth 1 vote.
- Non (those with profiles or links to them) will be worth 2 votes.
- AND, in effort to further develop our community here, fellow NL Bloggers will be worth 5 votes. One vote only and distinguished with a link back to their blog in their comment.
As I stop here and look at this now, I come to the realization that I perhaps put entirely too much thought into all this. Then again, you should see what I do as the commish for fantasy hockey league. Now that is obsessive compulsive. This is nothing!
So stay tuned for tomorrows blog because it all begins again. With these first round behind us and with what I believe to be improvements put in place, it's sure to be a fun ride! Let's see what happens shall we...