2006 Australian Blog Awards – Hangover

I had planned this to be a massive diatribe about all the whinging and moaning which is going on in some sections of the Australian blogosphere… whining and sooking that started with the nomination phase of the awards… actually some of them haven’t stopped since last year. That was the plan, but I’m not going to do that… not now anyway… maybe later.

Now, I’m just going to remind myself, and anyone else who want to listen why I do this each year… in my own time, for no financial gain… no gain actually.

I do it because there are some great local blogs out there and this is a great way to get them noticed and to give readers the opportunity to discover something they otherwise may not have. That, and that alone is the motivation.

Sure there were flaws in the process… there always have been… old ones are fixed and new ones arise… but I’m doing this by myself… I still have a 9 to 5 job to do… I still have a family to spend time with… I still have something that resembles a life… and I don’t have time to fix every problem when it happens. As it is, this years process was simpler than it has been in the past… no emails to me, then waiting for a reply which took upto 48 hours (if you were lucky). This year it was automated, and the longest people had to wait was ONE HOUR – which was the interval between updates of the voters registrations list with any new registrants to Collective Apathy. People claimed that they had to wait longer, but I checked that things were working, and if their (those complaining) email was listed, and they were, so the only problem there was probably with the complainant not refreshing their cache properly… and there is nothing I can do to fix that.

Other complaints were about the polls closing early. What? They closed at 12pm, as I announced would happen… people had 3 or so weeks to vote… okay, these complaints might be about the brief window of time when the ballots said “The deadline for this poll has passed.” but that was fixed within half an hour… before midnight and with a good 12 hours to go with voting.

The last thing I’m going to address here is my stuff-up in regards to Road to Surfdom winning two of the location categories (Overseas and South Australia). This I should have picked up, and should have eliminated one of the nominations (whichever location he spent less time in during the past year). But I didn’t notice it, it got passed and unluckily for me, it managed to win in both categories. I’m sorry I stuffed-up…

I think that’ll do for venting… for now. IF I put myself through all this again next year, things will be different. Changes will be made… I’ll take suggestions from the people and make things a little easier for people to vote… however… some thing won’t change. It’ll still be:

• Optional Preferential Voting – none of this panel of judges or first past the post rubbish… hell, it’s the Australian way.
• One Vote Per Person – it’s only fair.

I guess everything else will be up for discussion.

That is IF I do it again next year.

Conratulations to all the winners, thanks for your patience and understanding (some of you), and happy blogging. I hope you discovered a blog or two that you like.