POV | Indibloggies - The Indian Weblog Awards

Posts filed under 'POV'

Categorical statement

This is all for those quetching souls that have been twisting and turning in their beds every night since the 2005 event started, cursing me for the poorly chosen categories. Here is your chance to have your say.

Tell us which of the present Indibloggies categories should be dumped in the Ganges (the Tagline category, for example bore the brunt this year) and which all new categories should adorn the 2006 event. To set the ball rolling here are few new suggested categories (that emerged from the discussions here and in the blog neighborhood):

Best Food Indiblog
Most Humorous Indiblog
Best Podcast Indiblog

Go ahead; use the comments area to scribble your thoughts.

January 18th, 2006 | 13 comments | Permalink

Things you always wanted to ask us

People keep on asking questions, soemtimes they don’t ask us. For all such people, here are some FAQs answered. Our previous FAQ is here.

Q. What is the procedure of this year’s IndiBloggies? I haven’t understood. Nominations, jury, then nominations again, then voting, what’s going on?

A. The Indibloggies methodology has been changing every year. It’s still a 2-stage process, similar to the 2004 edition. In the 2004 event, Jurors were the ones who nominated all those blogs. For the 2005 edition, we still have Jurors, infact a whopping 28 of them but the nominations were an open process. Anybody could nominate blogs they felt deserved to win. The jurors then “rated” all these blogs on a scale of -1 to 5. The final scores were calculated based on all these ratings. The top N (N is not a steadfast number and would be decided based on the category) blogs in each category will make the final shortlist, and the readers — i.e., you — get to vote on that. No jury there.

Q. Wait. Wait. How did you calculate the scores? Didn’t you say there were 28 Jurors?

A. Yes, that’s why instead of taking an arithmatic average we went for a weighted score. Take an example: Say Blog A was rated by 6 Jurors in all. 2 of them thought the blog was suited for the “Best Indiblog Category” and 4 Jurors thought it was suitable for the “Best Topical Blog”. The former two Jurors rated the blog at 2 and 2 respectively. The latter 4 rated it -1, 3,3 and 2 respectively. So the final score of the blog would be split across two award-categories as follows:
Best Indiblog: 2X2 = 4
Best Topical: 1X(-1) + 2X3 + 1X2 = 7

Q. Why have a jury at all, why not voting straight away?

A. We didn’t want this to be just a simple popularity contest. We felt there should be an element of subjectivity involved. Also, if we had straight voting, the already-popular blogs would have taken all the prizes. This way, the jury gets a chance to dig out some hidden jewels from the blogs people nominate. And discovering new talent as well as honouring existing excellence are the main purposes of these awards.

Q. Why such a large jury?

A. A good jury should be a diverse one, and that is the reason it is large. We wanted jurors from all over the country, with different kinds of interests, so that they would not be constrained by biases of any kind.

Q. I’ve noticed that some blogs by jurors have been short listed. How come?

A. Jurors were not allowed to rate their own blogs during the process of selecting the final shortlist. So jurors whose blogs were nominated were actually at a disadvantage, as they had to rate their competitors, but could not rate their own. Having assembled such a fine jury, including several prizewinners and upcoming stars, it would have been unfair to leave their blogs out of contention.

Q. I am not able to see all the nominated blogs; the list at your blog only shows last 20 nominations.

A. The RSS Feed provided by del.icio.us shows only a limited number of latest nominations. However, you may see the categorywise nominations by appending the category “tag” to del.icio.us tag-search. Following are links to category-wise nominations.

Your questions is not here. Drop your questions in the comments area and we will include the answer if it deserves one.

December 28th, 2005 | 1 comment | Permalink

The winning gimmick

We are overwhelmed by the vote counts in this year’s poll. However some of the categories are seeing meteoric rise in the votes for a select few blogs. We also received reader comments and mails from the nominees about this. It was thus needed that we compile the points we have been raising time and again in this post.

We cannot afford to buy a poll software (Sparklit Poll Gold option would cost well above $100 for all the polls) and while we have been soliciting sponsors for the prizes we just cannot do so for the blog gimmicks. We thus have no option to rely on the limited functionality provided by the free version of the poll.
The free version of the poll offers some common modes to prevent cheating during voting, cookies, IP address and Captcha blocking. Each of these has their own set of advantages and limitations. Cookie blocking would prevent multiple votes being cast from the same machine, captcha blocking can differentiate to a fair extent between man and machine. These are the two preventives we have right now for all polls. IP address blocking is a bit tricky since it can potentially prevent people behind a firewall or using a common gateway from voting, reason why we dropped this option.
We have repeatedly stated that the ultimate aim of this blog is to showcase the outstanding blogs from across. The list of nominees is the effort that matters for us and we cannot prevent technically savvy people from playing foul. Fact remains that if somebody is adamant on tilting the votes (the science technology category has seen 600 voters while the average votes for all other categories is close to 200) we think readers are wise enough to gauge whether he deserves to win.

January 14th, 2005 | 2 comments | Permalink

FAQs answered

Here is our try on answering a few of the questions people keep on asking us:

Why are you doing this?

Coz somebody had to. We had begun last year by saying that it’s the Indianised version of bloggies..

So what’s on your agenda?

As flashed in our banner above, “showcase the excellence”. Inform others about blogs that are being liked universally, about what people like to read. Convince you that these blogs deserve to be on you blogroll and let you peek into blogs you would not otherwise ever visited .
Bind the bloggers together as a community
Promote other bloggers to write regularly and write good.

You mean to say this selfless act is for the betterment of the society and would eradicate poverty. I do not believe you.

(A long sigh..)

Tell me..isn’t it a vicious little plan of yours to promote your own blog?

Our blog is nowhere listed here, it wasn’t even nominated last year nor do we hope it would be this year. All tools/services used by Indibloggies come free. We are not making any moolah out of it.

Why beg to the sponsors? I am sure you are keeping some prizes with you.

If you call solicitation begging so be it..It’s a voluntary effort. Those who sponsor prizes get due credits here and may be a hike in their page hits. We can only offer that much. And since we do not play any role in distributing prizes there is no questions of us gobbling it up midway.

Will you be there next year too?

Hopefully yes, more than us it depends on whether these free services continue to be free.

Why appoint Jurors yourself. You cannot monopolize this affair.

Beg your pardon! This was started by yes and being managed by us so we have to ensure there is no anarchy out here; someone has to take hold of the strings. Did you expect us to hold a poll for selecting jury members? Do remember that the award is not for the jury but for the blogs and blog related services.

People say you go very well with the whine and pretty much accept any suggestion.

In the age of broken promises where even your chosen representatives don’t care when you whine, isn’t this a refreshing change?

My blog is much better than the listed ones, why wasn’t it nominated? / I sent my nomination to jurors, still it did not make it to the final list, why? / My blog won accolades at the Blah Blah awards and it does not feature here, what a joke!

Did you send a nomination request to the jurors? (Their mail ID was published on this blog and even a gimmick was available to post your nomination online to any of the juror). Even if you sent a nomination request it was the prerogative of the juror to include you if he liked your blog. Each juror was allowed to nominate a maximum of 3 blogs in a category which means there couldn’t have been more than 36 blogs in any category anyway. Emphasis in on quality and not quantity and judging quality is a subjective affair.

I am offended by my blog being listed here. I am not for limelight.

Tell us well in advance and if voting hasn’t started yet we would certainly remove your blog from the list of nominees. No questions asked!

I want to sponsor an award/donate for hosting of this blog on its own domain. How do I go about it?

We are flattered! Just drop us a mail at indibloggies at gmail dot com and we will get back to you. If you are thinking of sponsoring domain/hosting do write to us for details.

October 21st, 2004 | | Permalink

Support us by linking to us

We cheer the response received till now. But this laudable effort needs your help. Help us spread the word. The IndiBlog Awards requests you fellow IndiBloggers to link to this site at your Blog and website. We place on records our thanks to Jivha, Melodrama and Patrix.