JetPunk 2024 Blog Awards - Afterparty

Hello, everybody! At the end of the 2024 Blog Awards, I promised that I would release a follow-up blog where I would lay out some of my plans for the 2025 Blog Awards so you could give your feedback. I learned alot from running the blog awards once and have quite a few improvements that I'd like to make. This will also act as a sort of discussion forum where you guys can suggest ideas in the comments. Hopefully by the end of it we end up with an outline for a Blog Awards that we're all happy with!

I think a good place to start is with my thoughts on the previous blog awards so that we have a basic idea of what we're working off of. All in all, I'd consider the 2024 Blog Awards to be a success. It introduced the concept to generally positive reviews, and it gave recognition to alot of the best bloggers of the year (even if they didn't win). I felt like there were a good number of people who participated in the nomination and voting portions of the awards. It was alot more than I expected! When designing the Blog Awards I intentionally kept things simple to avoid overwhelming users and get the concept through the door, so to speak. In the process of doing that I think I may have oversimplified things a bit too much in some areas, which caused some blogs to end up in categories that weren't exactly fitting for them due to a lack of a more fitting category, and some elements of the nomination and voting processes could've been done better. While small issues that evidently didn't ruin the awards, they serve as a nice starting point for what to improve on for 2025.

For the most part, everything about the Blog Awards, from a functional perspective, ended up pretty much exactly as how I originally envisioned. One exception to that is the nomination forms. Originally I was just going to have people put the URLs for the blogs they were nominating, and there wasn't going to be a text box for people to justify their answer. For users it was the same thing, but with an additional box for people to include the URL to the user's best blog. In most award ceremonies, people are nominated alongside a work that they are representing and I thought it made sense to replicate that for the Blog Awards. I changed my mind because, when I came up with the idea of the justification box, it felt like too many text boxes for one form. Another concern I had for this is that this could turn the category into voting for the best blog, rather than the best user. I'm a little on the fence about including this so I wanted to know what you guys think about it.

Another question I have is, what did you guys think of the spreadsheet? Did you find it useful at all? If yes, how did you find it useful? Did you use it to find new blogs, did you use it to search for blogs you already knew existed, or did you use it for something else? If no, what sort of information could be added that you think would make this useful?

OK, well that's a little more than "a" question. But they're all related to the same subject. I personally found the spreadsheet useful because I had to read all the blogs, so having a complete list of every blog made it easy to track my progress. For that reason I will continue to create and share it even if nobody else uses it, however I would like for it to be useful for as many people as possible. One idea I had was to have a column on the spreadsheet dedicated for which categories the blog would fall under. For example, a story blog would have a story tag. This would make it simple for users to find new blogs for the category they're currently nominating for. On the other hand, this could ruin some of the interpretation element of the categories. Not every blog fits neatly under one category and writing down which one(s) I think they fall under may compel some users to nominate in accordance with my views, even if they feel that a blog should belong under a different category. That would be a huge shame, since one of my favourite parts of 2024's nomination process was reading everyone's justification for why this blog deserved to be nominated under a specific category.

Before I get into this, I'm not really asking for your opinions on self-nominations. I believe that if you believe that your blog is really, really good, that you should be able to nominate it. It would take alot of work to convince me otherwise. Rather, I just kind of wanted to vent some of my frustrations with the people who did self-nom. There were so many people who nominated like 9 other users with absolutely no explanations given, then for the tenth one they wrote, "oh, well I can only think of 9 other users I like, and I have one spot left, so... I'm just going to nominate myself. It's not as if I'll get picked anyways..." And it's like. Yeah. Obviously I'm not going to pick you if that's your reasoning for why you nominated yourself. The whole point of the justification text box is for you to justify why someone or something deserves to win the award. Even if you're the only one nominating yourself, if you can convince me that you deserve to win I will happily advance you to the voting stage. But I feel like so many people were caught up in not wanting to appear vain or self-centered that they didn't want to give themselves any sort of praise or credit or whatever. Granted, I think that everyone who self-nommed was like this to some extent, even the people that I think did it well. They opened with a quick "I know, I'm nominating myself, lol," then moved on to explain why they deserve the award. If you're worried about coming across like that, then this is how you should do it.

P.S. If you think I was talking about you specifically, I wasn't. There were multiple people who wrote pretty much this exact thing.

In the 2024 Blog Awards, I used ranked choice voting to determine the winners. I chose that method because I heard alot of good things about it, though now I'm thinking it may not have been the best choice for this. The voting base here is very small in comparison to those that ranked choice voting is designed for, so it's not quite as effective as it could be. I also just don't think it's a perfect methodology. For example, if everyone votes the same item in second place and everything else is jumbled around a bit, then even though everyone could agree the second place item was really good it would be the first item eliminated via ranking choice voting. Looking at this as a human, I feel as if the second place item should have won in this instance. One idea I had was a point based system, where the first place item on the list gets 5 points, second place gets 4, third gets 3, and so on and so forth. I want a system that allows every part of a user's rankings to matter, while still giving more weight to the top spots. If there's another system that works better for this that you know of please let me know.

One thing I scrapped right before publishing the awards ceremony were speeches from the winners. Part of the reason I didn't include it was because I just forgot to ask the winners to give speeches. I also didn't want to come across as conceited asking people to write an acceptance speech for an awards ceremony that they may not even be aware of. Now that I've already done one awards I feel a little more comfortable asking people for something like that, especially now that I've thrown the idea around on here, so I'll probably try to include it in the 2025 awards. As long as I don't forget. And direct messaging isn't removed.

New categories are probably the big thing on the agenda tonight. I purposefully kept the total number of categories low last year to avoid overwhelming people, but it's one of the biggest areas I want to expand upon in 2025. I've done some brainstorming for new ideas and these are my favourites I came up with. They cover some types of blogs that weren't properly covered in the 2024 awards, and some technical categories that I think might be interesting.

I also received some suggestions for new categories from other users, like Best Blog Series, Best Geography Blog, Best Sports Blog, etc. The latter two don't really fit into what my idea of the Blog Awards is, and I've already gone in-depth as to why a series category is pretty much impossible to make work and I doubt there's anything anyone can say to convince me otherwise. But still, leave your ideas in the comments. If nothing else, I promise to at least consider your idea.

Random stats! These are some statistics I found interesting about the nominations and voting processes, in case you find that kind of stuff interesting.

Wow, interesting, huh? I wonder what you're going to do with all that information.

Welp, that's just about everything I have to say. Again, if you have thoughts on anything I presented here, or you have ideas for something that I didn't, feel free to leave them in the comments below. The last thing I want to do is to go too far and make the Blog Awards overwhelming and unfun, so your feedback is pretty important to me.

That's all from me for now. Thanks for reading!

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