- What is the People's Choice Jewish and Israeli Blog Award?
In 2004, an award known as the JIBs was founded and was intended to be a friendly competition designed to drive new traffic to Jewish and Israeli Blogs (JIBs).
Unfortunately, as a result of a many problems, the founder of the awards who had the best of intentions and who worked hard to make it a success, decided to shut the awards down after two years.
In 2006, JBlog Central volunteered to host the 2006 JIB Awards, but problems similar to those encountered by the original founder ensued.
At the same time, the original founder of the JIBs also did not agree that the 2006 awards should reflect the votes of the JBlog Central community as recorded over a period of months, and had other disagreements with the process.
Faced with a choice of either limiting votes to a small time-frame or opening the awards to a more inclusive period of time, JBlog Central and the owner of Israellycool decided that the People's Choice award would not be referred to as the JIBs. Instead, the award with its new, more inclusive format, will reflect the fact that it is an award based on the choice of a large, open community, where each vote is available to the public for inspection 24/7. The founder ofthe JIBs' own remarks can be found on his site.
- What was the process of the awards?
Award categories were created mostly based on last year's configuration and following a community discussion. All bloggers and visitors were invited to nominate their favorite JBlogs from a list of more than 300 blogs listed on JBlog Central and rated by JBlog Central's community members over a period of seven months. Blogs that were not previously listed, were invited to be added to the list of blogs in the JBlog Central system. Total community ratings were then tabulated for each nominee and published openly.
- How did the 2006 People's Choice Jewish and Israeli Blog Award compare with prior years?
The 2006 awards had some similarities and some differences when compared to prior years.
| People's Choice Award |
Previous Years' JIBs |
| Large number of award categories |
Large number of award categories |
| Community participation in choosing award categories |
Community participation in choosing award categories |
| Hundreds of JBlogs from which to choose |
Dozens of JBlogs from which to choose |
| Voting tabulated from 7 months of community votes |
Voting collected during limited awards timeframe |
| Thousands of voters cast their votes |
Dozens of voters cast their votes |
| System better at rating blogs in their totality |
System better at rating specific posts and series of posts within a particular blog |
- What if someone consistently gives a particular blog low ratings, or consistently gives their own blog high ratings?
Any blogger or site visitor may rate any particular post as they see fit, whether it is in their own blog or the blogs of others. We encourage bloggers to participate in rating posts, because they are often the best judges of quality and can point out their best posts or those of others.
To help ensure that the voting is conducted fairly, we use specialized software to record and analyze certain technical information about each vote as it enters our system, and we can detect voting activity that is outside the norm. We set strict limits on how often any visitor can vote on any particular post, and we display a detailed history of activity for each and every post in our system. Our system is transparent and all site visitors have access to the voting information in real-time, 24/7.
Since we began operating in June, 2006, we have found that deliberate low ratings and self-promotional ratings tend to balance out each other, and they account for a very small portion of the total votes, although this phenomenon tends to be an annoying byproduct of an open community-based voting system. Still, the advantages of community participation far outweigh any downside.
- Were there any special challenges?
The JBlog Central service is designed to allow a large community to rate posts and blogs on a real-time basis. Ratings of posts are then recorded in aggregate to give an overall picture of how the community views a particular blog. This allows us to very accurately rate any particular blog. However, award categories that are intended to recognize an outstanding series of posts on a particular blog, or a 'blog carnival' hosted on several blogs, is something our system is not set up to do very well.
This type of rating would typically be done manually, but in the case of the JBlog voters, the number of total participants is so small and so skewed due to personal relationships among a small group of self-interested bloggers, that the results would not be statistically valid in any case. As the number of blogs in the JBlogosphere grows, this margin of error will lessen. We'd recommend that in the future, a better solution should be implemented for certain award categories.
- Why don't you have award caegories for 'Best Post' and 'Best Series of Posts'?
Please see above.
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