Personal & Overall Up

We have received the polls for the Personal and Overall categories and have put them up for your voting pleasure.

Sorry For The Voting Delay; Overall & Personal Still Delayed

Sorry for the delay in voting. We have been facing a bit of a technical problem.

Since the biggest categories (Overall and Personal) require a customized poll from the polling service, it takes longer than usual to receive those completed polls. We were hoping to receive them by this Sunday, when that didn’t happen, we went for a short delay for the purpose of releasing of all of polls out at once.

However, it is now Tuesday, so what we have decided to do is release all of the other completed polls and get Overall and Personal up as soon as possible.

The schedule has changed as follows:

First Round: December 1 – December 12
Second Round: December 13 – December 19

Sorry for this and thanks for your understanding.

Short Delay in Start of Voting

We’ll be shooting to get the voting up on time tonight, but at this moment I can’t confirm that will happen.

As you may know, the Grey Cup game is on today (and I’m a die-hard Riders fan) so I will be glued to the tube. And Northern BC Dipper who has primary access to our voting system forgot when we scheduled the voting start date that he’d be away for a convention this weekend. So it’s looking like voting will be ready early this week instead of today. Thanks for your understanding and patience.

~Saskboy
CBA co-Operator

2009 Nominations Closed

The nomination period for 2009 has ended.

Please come back Sunday, November 29th for Round 1 voting.

2009 Nominations Open

The nomination period for the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards has begun.

To nominate somebody, go the the “Nominate 2009” page, read the descriptions of the available categories, then click the link at the top of that page to go to the nomination form.

One can send nominations until November 21st.

CBA 2009 Changes: Why Are The Most Of The Political Categories Missing?

Another change that those of us that are more politically active have probably noticed is: where are the best conservative, progressive, Non-partisan, and feminist blogs?

They have been removed. The only political category that there is now is the best political blog category itself. Why have we decided to take this step?

The main reason is that we have noticed that some political bloggers from different sides of the political spectrum have not treated the Canadian Blog Awards as a coming together and friendly competition of the Canadian blogosphere, but as an all-out war in which anything that is seen as, well, “serving the other side”, if you will, must be fought by trolling, subverting the nominations process, and negative campaigns. After a few years of trying to come up with a balance fair to all sides of the political spectrum, we have decided that the only fair action is the removal of most of the political categories themselves.

Another reason is that, while looking at other national blog awards, we had noticed that they didn’t have as many political categories as the Canadian Blog Awards did.

However, the Canadian Blog Awards realizes that the political category would not be fun without bloggers of all sides of the political spectrum contesting the second round. What we have done to ensure that is happens is that first of all, we are using a preferential ballot to help avoid vote-splitting, and  second of all we have instituted a new rule which states that for any category that has 30 or over nominees, the second round will consist of the top 10 ranking nominees from the first round.

Some CBA 2009 Changes

I’m sure that most people can’t wait until nominations open this Sunday, October 25th.

Well, we can’t speed up time, but we can give a short preview of some of the changes that have been make for this year’s version of the Canadian Blog Awards.

The most exciting is the introduction of an instant run-off ranked ballot, hosted by DemoChoice. Now, voters can rank the nominees for most favourite to least favourite (or more realistically, select their top 1, 2, or 5 favourite blogs.)  If your first favourite blogs has too few few to win, your vote is transferred to your second favourite blog. A better explaination of the process can be found here, or better yet, try out this example ballot.

Along with the new voting system are changes to who gets into the Second Round. Any category with 30 nominees or over will have the top 10 ranking blogs from the first round into the second round. Any category with under 30 nominees will have the top 5 ranking blogs from the first round. This change will allow blogs with a  larger diversity of views within the bigger categories to compete for the top spot. Since we are using an instant run-off ranked ballot, vote splitting is now less of a concern.

As well, this year, we have added a Hall of Fame rule: any blog that wins a category three times shall be placed into a Hall of Fame to open up competition. The Hall of Fame will be implemented for CBA 2010.

CBA 2009 Timetable

As Autumn creeps up on Canadians, there are more bloggers asking if the CBAs will be running soon.

The answer is yes!

The Canadian Blog Awards 2009 will be arriving in October 2009, so hang onto your hats and we’ll get more details to you before this month is over.

You can contact us if you’d like to volunteer to organize and run the CBAs this year. Leaving a comment here is fine too.

We’re not taking nominations yet, that should begin on October 25th.

Nomination Period: October 25 – November 21
First Round: November 29 – December 5
Second Round: December 6 – December 12

2009 Commitee

The 2009 CBAs are not yet underway, but organizing them begins this week. Many of last years’ Operators are continuing their roles, and we want to grow our group to include more bloggers from more genres and backgrounds so we can have a bigger and better awards for 2009. If you’re interested, please contact us at
canadianblogawards -AT- GMAIL.COM
with a short explanation of your background in blogging, and what you’d like to see done. If we can use your talent, we’ll add you to the team of Operators who are responsible for running a fun, and fair awards.