Award Nominations Are Closed!
The Nomination process for the 2007 American Wine Blog Awards is over. We now move on to the judging phase. We will not be revealing the judges until after the process for the obvious reasons.
What the judges will do is look at the various nominations in each of the seven categories. The will evaluate them on the same criteria we offered for the nomination process. Together they will deliver 4 Finalists in each category.
Before the nominations are sent over to the judges they are being vetted for base qualifications: are they in English and do they have the requisite number of posts.
I hope to have the finalists named and the voting going in about 10 days. But no promises.
We’ll be announcing the finalists not only here at FERMENTATION but in a press release to the wine media (in case you are wondering, the "Wine Media" also means wine Bloggers) and other folks in the media.
Thanks to EVERYONE who who took part in the Nomination process…On to the Finalists.
Tom, three comments now that nominations are closed.
1 – next year, I hope you will consider doing a new category just for blogs written by somms or other people who select and pour wine for a living. Scott Tracy has a beautifully written, fascinating new post about selecting a Alban Roussanne to pair with a fish dish up on is blog today that perfectly illustrates why this should be a special category.
http://web.mac.com/scottnapa/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html
2 – for this category, and also for the winery category, I think the 50 post requirement is too rigorous. I don’t think we can expect winemakers and vintners to be glued to their computers the way the rest of us are. Similarly, people like Scott typically work 12 hour days on their feet, so it’s hard to do much blogging.
3 – I’m not sure that would be fair to do as Josh from Pinot Blogger suggests and penalize the blogs that are nominated, but I agree that it’s damn silly for dozens of lemmings to nominate, for example, a general wine blog in the Winery Blog category. Perhaps anybody who submits such a nomination should have their email address sent to all the spammers in Asia and Russia.
Tom,
I have a quick question/comment for you as well…
When you say: “do they have the requisite number of nominations”, what exactly do you mean? I wasn’t aware that the initial round of nominations was a popularity vote. I assumed that once a blog was nominated, it didn’t need to be nominated again…and again…and again. All of my choices were already selected by other people, so I didn’t bother adding my two cents in the comment thread, but if that hurts those blogs’ chances of getting through to the finals, then that was awfully poor of me.
Similar to what johng said above, the spamming of blogs was a little unnecessary, and in some cases, inappropriate for the category it was nominated in. I would prefer for the judges to look at ALL blogs nominated per category that meet all of the criteria, rather than only those that got the most nods. Some of the sleepers with 1-3 votes might turn out to be the best, albeit less well known (for the moment) stuff out there.
WOW….Good catch! Eric. That should have been “Requisite numbe of POSTS” las year.
Thanks for catching that.
Cheers,
Tom…
John: Relative to the correction that Eric points out needs to be made to this post, those folks where were nominated multiple times only made sure I didn’t miss the first nomination.
I can’t speak to the number of posts a winemaker should have on a winery blog right now. I’d like to think on it considerably and talk to others.
thansk!
Tom…
Phew! Glad that was just a typo.
(And it’s Erin, though the number of times I get called Eric is somewhat disturbing.)
hi John – I think we can expect that the folks doing these awards will apply some sort of reasonable standards for each award – eg a winery blog is actually published by a winery, or a graphics candidate actually has some non-text content… I have a high confidence in this occurring.
I would not, however, want to see the number of posts requirement reduced. It was pretty clear that this number, an average of once per week, was chosen to establish a commitment to the medium. If you can’t devote a half hour a week maybe you should find another outlet for your talents…
In an earlier post I suggested that a “new wine blog” award be established for blogs that started during the year and that may not meet the 52 post criteria. I hope Tom agrees…