SA Blog Awards 2008 is upon us and You get to have your say

The 2008 South African Blog Awards is scheduled for its annual process of nominating and voting in February and March.

The awards team would like to publicly present this year’s process to all interested parties on Wednesday 23 January at 17h30 on the outside deck of Cafe Neo in Mouillie Point, Cape Town.
Anyone with an interest in how this year’s awards will work is more than welcome to attend. Please note that this is your opportunity to voice your input about the awards process. We’re doing this in order to finalise the system in a public forum.

If you cannot make the presentation and feel strongly about the awards format, please arrange for representation to be there to express your opinion.

Update: I just wanted to remind everyone in case Wednesdays meeting turns out into a mud slinging match 🙂 The meeting on Wednesday will be a presentation meeting, to let you know what will be happening and to formally kick off the awards. The format of the awards has already been decided upon.

Also, I have created a twitter account “sablogawards” which I’ll be using to let everyone know what’s happening at the presentation and throughout the awards, so if you’re interested in keeping track of the awards, follow the twitter.

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21 Responses to "SA Blog Awards 2008 is upon us and You get to have your say"

Nic says:

17 January 2008 at 16:18

Hmmmm, I’m super interested to know how this all goes down this year as opposed to last. Would LOVE to be at the meeting but wont be able to make it unfortunately!

Hope it goes well!!

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Mike Stopforth says:

17 January 2008 at 17:32

Somebody liveblog it pls…

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Tyler says:

17 January 2008 at 19:08

In fact, can’t someone create a Twitter account for it.. eg. sablogawards.

Then at the event someone can Tweet the event and those of us in JHB can push through ideas via Twitter.

🙂

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Chris M says:

17 January 2008 at 19:26

Awesome!

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Nic says:

18 January 2008 at 09:39

Twitter channel great idea, and I think the live blog is a goodie.

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Miguel dos Santos says:

18 January 2008 at 10:13

Cool, Thanks for the suggestion guys. I’ll be taking you up on that.

I’ve added an sablogawards twitter account, which I’ll using to liveblog the events of not only the upcoming presentation, but the rest of the awards also.

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Keith says:

18 January 2008 at 10:52

What about different awards for different categories…? I run the financial/investment blog (www.SmallCaps.co.za) which is successful in its own right, but only appeals to a certain segment of the public (i.e. investors).

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Andre Bothma says:

18 January 2008 at 10:57

Dear All

I will regrettably not be able to attend, as I will be fishing in the Transkei at that time:)

I submitted an email to the judges, yet did not receive a response:

Would one of you please be as kind as to raise the question on whether or not a category for Best Environmental/Green Blog will be introduced?

Ta muchly!

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Miguel dos Santos says:

18 January 2008 at 16:22

Additional categories will be introduced this year, but those categories that don’t receive enough interest and nominations will be dropped. With the rise in interest in the environment and green living I think there will be a category for it this year. But if it doesn’t come up I’ll raise it at the meeting. I think financial/investment would form part of business blog, but we’ll see.

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Charl says:

18 January 2008 at 16:27

And the winners are ..

Steve Hofmeyer, Peas on Toast, Cherry Flava and 2oceansvibe..

wow what a surprise..

(;

Will try make the Wed meeting..

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Miguel dos Santos says:

18 January 2008 at 16:30

lol 🙂 no seriously I think this year and all future years will be better

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Steve Hayes says:

20 January 2008 at 17:45

This is the first I head of this thing. I found it by accident surfing on MyBlogLog.

So I have a few questions: who appointed this “awards team”? Who are the awards team?

I get the picture of a bunch of 1930s gangsters in those dinky hats with suits and violin cases rocking up at Mouille Point, shooting up the bar to get silence, announcing the format, saying “any questions?” and then leaving.

Now it’s probably not like that but is there anywhere else where one learns about this stuff, apart from this blog?

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Miguel dos Santos says:

21 January 2008 at 13:18

🙂 Hi Steve, I like the imagery, but no, it’s not quite like that.
The SA Blog Awards was originally instigated 3-4 years ago by Jon Cherry, of Cherryflava. We joined him last year to assist him technically with the online nomination and voting system and so this year more people have volunteered their assistance with the organization of the awards to help make it bigger, better and more widely recognized.
We’ll probably put everything up on the blog awards site soon after Wednesday’s presentation. So you will be able to find out more there soon.

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Andrew says:

21 January 2008 at 13:19

I think that’s the point of Wednesday’s meeting Steve. If you’re interested in the awards process then make sure you’re there, or send a representative.

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Isobel McKenna says:

23 January 2008 at 09:44

Good luck with this years Blog Awards. I hear that there is a kick-off meeting planned for this evening? Here is a question for you:
For those parties interested in the process and not able to be physically present – is there a dial-in-number?

Also, why don’t we split the podcast award into different categories – People’s choice – Video Podcasts – Business – Comedy – Cultural/Arts – Entertainment – Family – Technology – Business – Political – Travel – General – just to give you a few ideas. I am not sure how many South African podcasters are out there – but the community is bound to be growing.

Cheers Isobel from 123listen2me.com

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Miguel dos Santos says:

23 January 2008 at 12:06

I had a listen to your podcast Isobel. I really liked it 🙂

I don’t think the podcast category will be broken down into subcategories this year. I don’t think the South African podcast community is big enough for that yet, but if there is a huge variety of submissions to the blog awards this year and we see there is significant growth it might be considered next year.

I’d expect podcasting and vlogging would grow significantly in the next year or so, so maybe…

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Isobel McKenna says:

24 January 2008 at 12:01

Thanks for you comment Miguel and for streaming the meeting yesterday evening. I look forward to reading the summary – presumably it will be posted on the Sablogawards website?

I agree that podcasting and vlogging has huge potential for growth in South Africa. I will certainly do my best to continue spreading the word about podcasting – and if anybody would like some instruction – contact me!

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Miguel dos Santos says:

24 January 2008 at 15:56

Ja, I’ll be updating the SA Blog Awards site shortly. I’ll inform everyone by posting here and twittering on the sablogwards channel when I’m done.

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Stefano Kezzing says:

28 January 2008 at 20:25

Quite exciting but it looks like Seth at 2oceansvibe is at it again. Wasn’t there a bit of a drama last year as well?

http://www.2oceansvibe.com/2008-blog-awards.htm

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Justin Hartman says:

11 February 2008 at 12:40

There is a major issue with this system. Avusa, which has a couple thousand employees, uses one single IP address and when I went to nominate I noticed that I’m seeing nominations from someone else in the building. Not good.

You guys need to resolve this…

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Miguel dos Santos says:

11 February 2008 at 13:23

Oi! It should only use ip address as a backup. The primary means of saving your nominations is using cookies.
So if everyone there has cookies disabled on their browser, I can imagine the problems people are going to have. I didn’t figure there would be that many people with cookies disabled though 🙁
I’ll see what I can do. Any suggestions?

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