Winning Style

I promise that this will be my last post about the whole Bloggies scandal. At least for a while.

Dawn Olsen is putting together the Big Ass Blog Awards in response, which doesn't sound like a terrible idea to me.

It seems to me that part of the problem was how the Bloggies were nominated: one round of at-large nominations, then a select panel of volunteers winnowed out the huge list of nominees to produce the finalists. However, since the select panel had access to the entire list, they could cherry-pick their favorites whilst ignoring the rest of the list.

My modest proposal would be a little bit different.

The first round of at-large nominations would stay the same: after all, the blogosphere is so huge that no one person can read them all.

The second round would be a bit different, though. First, the nominees should be cut off to only include the top X number (25 seems like a nice number) of blogs in each category. Second, and more importantly, the judges wouldn't be asked to view each site and to pick their top five. Instead, each judge would receive a list of five (or maybe ten) nominees, and they would be asked to rate each blog on a 0-5 scale in a number of categories (for example: Content, Design, Timeliness, and Returnablity for a theoretical maximum of 20 points). Once all the judges have reported back and the scores all averaged out (if you really wanted to get fancy, you could throw out the high score and the low score for each nominee and then normalize each judge's scores), the top five-scoring blogs would be listed as finalists.

This should, in theory, help limit the gaming of the system.

Does this make sense to anyone else?