Shut Up. I'm Talking.

27th Sep 2010

The SA Blog Awards – Pass me a soap box and a red carpet

Ok so now that the SA Blog Awards are done I can say that I enjoyed myself from the start of voting all the way till two days AFTER the awards.

What a comedy from so many sides. I loved it.

It started off with the haters hating (read those comments, awesome) that some people actually make money off their blogs. Only in South Africa could this possibly happen, how dare you actually make money from blogging you sell out? Yep… it is actually frowned upon.

While that was going on we had this crazy voting system which was built in a way that let readers vote for you every 24 hours. The reasoning for this was that it was some kind of ‘proof’ that you had returning visitors. Now look, I visit TechCrunch everyday, I love it, but I am not going to go vote for them every time I visit. It takes time and it makes no sense. The net result was canvassing like crazy to get peeps to vote for you.

So that was an epic fail no matter which way you argue it.

Then understandably, because of space and budgets, only the top two from each category got invited to the awards. No problem there. Top 3 would have been cool but top 2 is also fine. Many people had a heart attack over this because they felt they had a right to be there. Shame.

Then the judging. To me this made some sense, instead of bloggers voting for who had the best blog they had people in the industry that the blog was about, vote for who was best. At the end of the day if I blog about cars I don’t want a blogger to judge my content, I need a reputable car journalist to judge my content. That is what happened but some blogger peeps couldn’t quite gather how they got excluded from judging.

Now that I have primed you, let us skip to awards night.

I had to ask for a ticket because initially I wasn’t invited. That didn’t bother me one bit, so what if I had to ask… at least I got to go and witness it.

The CEO of the SA Blog Awards took center stage at the awards as he was the organiser and needed to open proceedings. The CEO of SABA is also a radio presenter on one of our local stations, so he is supposedly impartial to the ‘cliques’ that go on in blogging.

Problem is that he got quite cosy in the spot light didn’t seem to want to relinquish the attention. Some glowing moments were when he claimed that ‘no longer will the winners of the awards be determined by friends’ and ‘this will be the first REAL blog awards’. The best moment was when he decided to take a dig at Seth Rotherham for starting an online Radio show. He felt the need to remind Seth that ‘In the radio world the big boys come out to play, so watch out’. What a joke!

And then it got better.

With most of the winners announced there were two more to go including, Best New Blog (we won it last year, #triple_back_pat_all_the_way).

When it came to announcing Best New Blog the MC (Mumz, comedian and absolute funny guy – definitely a highlight) opened the envelope to find that the slip was BLANK! In a mad scramble a confused Mumz went up to the CEO to ask what was going on, they had a quiet discussion between themselves and then handed the trophy to one of the organisers without actually announcing the winner! When the gallery asked who won there was stuttering and stumbling until they quickly blurted out a name.

It was classic to watch. Classic.

After that spill they announced Best New Blog which was rightfully won by WAT KYK JY. Once it all ended the majority of us had a cool time at the bar afterward, laughing and enjoying ourselves – another highlight IMO.

Thinking that all the best parts had past us I wake up today to see a blog post from my a friend stating that he had been “dupped by the SA Blog Awards.”

Seems The perception is that because he has won twice before that he should have been invited. In my opinion no one had any particular right to be there and if he had just asked for a ticket, like most of us did, he would have got one and no one would have noticed. Now it looks like sour grapes.

At the end of the day we are literally just bloggers, some stuff we write is worth reading but most of the time its all dribble and nonsense and mostly not that important.

The blog awards really do bring out the cry babies among us and few actually notice that it’s not really that important – it won’t change your life peeps.

The most important thing is that you pump out good content, your READERS are more important than awards. If you won a blog award you probably won’t see a massive surge of traffic and if you lose you won’t see a drop in traffic. I bet that you won’t see one hit go missing purely because you lost the awards.

Some of us need to chill out. If you want to compete in something then choose a sport but crying about the blog awards really makes us all look bad.