In this year’s Search Engine Journal Search Blogs Awards, I took a different approach at the blog rating system, giving voters the option to rate only the blogs that they want to rate. In the past, ranking each blog was required.
According to the instructions, voters were to rate blogs and other entries from 1 to 5, 5 being the highest and 1 the lowest. If they were not familiar with the blog, they could skip it. The idea in allowing this was for smaller blogs to be able to compete with blogs that have larger audience, and be judged by quality, not quantity of votes.
The true value of such awards is to share some search blogs, communities and groups which some readers may not normally visit and I hope that goal was met. I know that personally, I was introduced to several new blogs which I have made priorities on my RSS reader. If our audience and voters have done the same, the competition has served its purpose.
Some of the results are intriguing, and even different because of the selections and ratings by voters. For an example, 400 voters may have rated one blog with 30% of those votes being a 5, but 200 voters may have rated one blog with 35% of those votes being a 5.
This brings an interesting dilemma. Which is a better quality metric? The amount of votes or the percentage of readers voting for a particular blog?
So, I decided in some of the categories I will list two blogs as winners; based upon this dilemma.
Tomorrow we will be announcing the winners, and to all of you who voted, thank you
