Rules

The following are the SA blog awards rules.

A "blog" is defined as a webpage with dated entries.
Only blogs written within the Republic of South Africa and / or blogs written by South African citizens are eligible to be considered for the awards.
The contest is open to any blogs that existed for a period of time during the year 2008/2009, so weblogs that were discontinued during 2008 are also eligible.
Only one nomination form and one finalist voting form may be submitted per person.
E-mail addresses are required to nominate and vote. You must use your own address and confirm the validation e-mail.
If you attempt to submit a second ballot, your first one will be replaced.
Judges and Organiser's blogs are not eligible for the awards

How it's going to work?

The Awards are split into two separate stages:

Nominations: Nominations from the general public will be open from 1st March 2009 to ~~14th March 2009~~ 18th March 2009.
- URLs are required.
- The maximum number of weblogs you may nominate for a category is three (3) for most categories and four (4) for Weblog of the Year.
- At least three (3) different weblogs in total must be nominated.
- There is no limit to the number of categories a weblog may be nominated for.
- Nominees have to fit the category they are placed in.
After 18th March 2009, judges will add in their votes and the top 10 blogs in each category will go through to the final Voting stage.
Voting: Once again, only one vote per email address will be accepted.
Final voting will be open to the public from the 21st March 2009 till midnight 31st March 2009.

Voters will be asked to review the ten blogs per category in the finals and vote for their favourite blog in each.

Judges will similarly vote for their favourite, and the blog which receives the highest votes will win the category.

How does the judging work and winners decided?

Each judge gets a username and password to login to the SA blog awards website and cast their votes.
They are each assigned 3 categories to judge (Best SA Blog of the Year, and 2 others).

Judges will be asked to provide input at the end of the nomination phase as well as the voting phase.

During the nomination phase they will each get 10 votes for each of their assigned categories (for each of the 10 finalists).
They will be asked to take the number of nominations a blog as received into account, but not base their vote soley on the number of nominations.
Their vote during the nomination phase will count 50% of the finalist weighting (the public's will count 50%) so the number the public's nominations still matter, but not as much as in the voting phase.

If we only used the number of nominations to determine the finalists in each category, as you might imagine, this leads to bias in favor of the bigger, more established blogs. Also, provided the nominate me widget most blogs will be nominated equally in multiple categories, so if they have a high nomination count it will be equally high in all their selected categories. And so we need the judges vote more than ever to determine accurate finalists, more so that during the voting phase even.
If we get accurate finalists, we get accurate winners.

In the voting phase the vote weighting will be 30% judges and 70% public.