Things you always wanted to ask us

Closer to the Polls :: Meet the Indibloggies 2005 nominees »

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 | POV

1 Comment (Add your own)

1. रवि | December 30th, 2005 at 6:30 am

Ya, thanks. With these lists we indeed got to know quite a handful of really-beautiful-blogs that we were un-aware of!

PS: link:
http://del.icio.us/tag/ib05Indic

Gives list of whole Indic nominated blogs (irrespective of language)