Committee Roles

The following are the guidelines set for the roles of organizing committee:

1. Check whether the nominated blog has satisfied the Qualification guidelines.
2. Check if the nominated blog is at the right category/categories.
3. The committee member has a right to nominate his blog as long it's a public voting.

Qualification

I think that this matter is done, here are the rules of qualification:

1. Arabic and English weblogs quality.
2. The author must be Omani. A non-Omani resident in Oman may qualify as long as his weblog is related to Oman somehow.
3. The weblog must have been started before the 1st of July 2005. (Calkoon suggests the minimum age of the blog 5 months, blogs started after June should be 5 months old in December.)
4. The blog should have a minimum of 20 posts.

Categories

OK, this one is a long matter, several people thought that we need more than one award category, the category ideas that popped up were:

- Best Personal Weblog (AKA Diary-type weblog)
- Best Non-Personal Weblob (Topic-type weblog)
- Most Active Weblog
- Best Designed Weblog
- Most Beloved Weblogger

First of all, I don't think that the 'active' and 'beloved' awards are necessary, the frequency of updating a weblog is an essential element in voting for a blog to get the award, the combination of quality of posts and their frequency is what makes a blog worthy of the award. I don't think that a blog that is frequently updated with useless posts should be awarded for the mere fact that the author frequently updates without taking regard to the quality of what he posts. The most beloved blogger award should not be given, I mean, are we going to give someone an award because he/she simply has so many friends even though his blog sucks? When it comes to this award, if people really love someone, it should be because his/her blog is great, and this should/would make them vote for that blog to win the main prize.

The original basis of the Omani Blog Awards were expected to be based on voting so that the winners will be chosen by the public. For us to use the voting method to give the awards would require a sufficient number of nominees in each category, this means that we will need to have a sufficient number of topic-type blogs to have a seperate category for people to vote in. Do we have a sufficient number of 'pure' topic-type blogs? I don't think so, the majority of Omani blogs are either personal-diary-type blogs, or hybrid blogs of a mixture of topic-type and diary-type blogs. We cannot call a blog a topic type blogs when half the posts are about personal life events that happened to the author, and it might be easy to differentiate between blogs that have 50% of personal posts from a blog that has 95% of personal posts, but in reality, can we even find a proper percentage? we cannot really tell how much more personal is one blog from another and this way we cannot separate a the mix category from the pure diary blogs. Of course, this is all my personal view and it would be great if anyone can prove that we have a sufficient number of pure-topic-type Omani blogs on the web.

I like the idea of the best designed blog, but there is clearly not a sufficient number of Omani blogs that were designed by their authors themselves, somebody suggested that we pick the winner. I don't know, should we deviate from the general scheme of the awards and 'Choose' the winner ourselves, and by 'We', I think that the Organsing Committee (Blue_Chi, Petite For Life, and Devilish) are supposed to be to make that choice. This committee was self assigned, do you trust us to make an unbiased decision and pick who really deserves to win this award? Does this mean that we have to DISQUALIFY OURSELVES from the whole competition because we will play the role of the judges, do you think that anybody here wants us to be the judges of the awards. I think that this is going to be a great deviation from what this was originally planned to be, the fact that we do not have a sufficient number of entries to create a separate category should simply be a conclusive matter.

This is the first time we have such an event and I think that we should do it in extreme simplicity, one category, winner and runner ups selected by voting.

Timing of the Awards

We would like to thank everyone on their suggestions, we now have a better idea of how we should run this. I am going to type down the main points of what we have thought of until now in separate posts.

Everyone agreed on that we should run awards at a later time period, the majority suggested that we do the submission/nomination stage in November, and have the voting in December. It makes even more sense to have the awards of the year 2005 and the end of it.

I think that this issue is done.

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Welcome to the Omani Blog Awards 2005

Before we start, I would like to thank Devilish for supporting the idea when I got in touch with him at the start to get on with this, secondly, I would like to thank Petite For Life for taking initiative and starting this weblog for us to host the event and organise as well from the same point.

I am not doing this on my own and I would like to have some feedback and suggestions from all our fellow Omani bloggers out there, I believe that the Omani Blog Awards would be a great event to have because of three main reasons:

1. It is an opportunity to celebrate the Omani weblogs that we are addicted to and thank their owners for their great efforts in maintaining these weblog.
2. It would functions as an incentive for bloggers to look after and update their weblogs even more.
3. It is an opportunity to learn more about Omani weblogs.
   

For our even to be successful we have to agree on some rules and regulations, these are my personal views of what should be done, please feel free to comment on these, my opinions could possibly be completely crappy, so please do tell me when I don't make much sense. First of all, qualification: This is an Omani Blog Awards, I think that only blogs made by Omani individuals on whatever topic, blogs made by non-Omani individuals that are located currently in Oman, and blogs made ABOUT Oman should qualify for this.

Blog categories, should there be any? The majority of the Omani blog, whether topic based or personal diary format blogs, should both qualify for this event. Professional weblogs and corporate blogs should not qualify.

Another issue about qualification is activity, I think that we should set a minimum time age limit for the blog to qualify (e.g. 2 months) blogs that were been around for less than two months should not qualify. Related to this is the matter of amount of content, I think that there should be a minimum number of entries made to the blog to qualify, I suggest 20.

Now moving on the actual event, I suggest that we make a 'submission post' where people should reply with their blog URLs to enter the event. After a specified period for submission, (e.g. 2 weeks) we start a poll with all the qualifying entries, qualifying members should them make announcements at their weblogs requesting their visitors to vote for them to win the award. The winner does not get any physical prize, but will be titled at the Best Omani Weblog for 2005. The link for the blog will be highlighted at this page and a special graphic would be given the winner to publish it at their blog.

OK, those are my ideas, comments?