Blog Awards Reprise

I attended the SA Blog Awards ceremony on Friday night.

Good fun.

Very well done.. Chris, Dave, Miguel and Tyler.

Many familiar faces, but also many new faces.. people I’ve not seen at any geeky events before.. oh, and a fair number of hot woman, can you believe it? (-;

I few comments and suggestions.. for improvements:

• I liked the dog-tags idea.
• The club venue worked well, the only negative was all the smoking and limited ventilation. Sure it’s a club, but it’s before 21:00 and it’s the blog awards people.. go outside.
• Chris was super successful in getting lots of sponsors this year, maybe a bit too successful. I’d suggest next year should have a bit more of a formal sponsorship structure.. silver, gold, platinum.. or something like that. Cap it at 10 or even 5. People get bored listening to 30 different sponsors who gave 3 tshirts each. Surely the value for key sponsors gets diluted if there are so many sponsors.
• The format/structure of announcing each winner in sequence needs some thought. It gets a little bit boring. Maybe less categories. Maybe some entertainment in between. Maybe something as simple as a good story to keep the audience focused and involved.

About the results:

I’m impressed that we have at least one pro blogger.. (not sure if hobos blog or if that would count).

I am a bit concerned about the result for the best blog award and the message this sends about South African bloggers.. though I know this is (in theory) more a message about South African blog readers. Then again the blog awards are for bloggers.. that’s just my “by the geeks for the geeks” kinda thinking. It should be about recognising the work of our peers.

The best blog result reminds me a bit of Epic 2014..

At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.

I know tabloids are probably the fastest growing and dependable print media business. I get the whole democracy thing.. it’s about popularity.. and it’s not perfect but it’s the best system we have, I get that “sex sells”, but.. I simply wish we could have a best blog focused on something like entrepreneurship or really cool new and innovative ideas.

I’m not against involving the general public in the voting process.. they are the readers, but maybe a more merit based (as opposed to popularity) voting system should be used for at least the best blog.

The blog awards have been going for a while. We have an idea who the leading bloggers are. I would suggest we ask them (previous winners and judges) for an OPML export each to see what the bloggers read (as opposed to what the readers read).

Should be very easy to parse, count and pop out a top 10. I’d love to see the results.