The Omani Blog Awards 2005

OBA Contact

2008-12-26T13:48:00.002+04:00

For any query, please email us @ theomaniblogawards [at] gmail [Dot] com.

Results OBA2005

2006-02-09T18:30:00.000+04:00

On behalf of OBA2005 committee I would like to thank all those who participated in OBA2005, be it by nominating a blog, voting for a blog, or simply by suggesting ways to make this award a success. One again, on behalf of the OBA2005 committee I hereby announce the official winners of OBA2005 :

The Muscatis by muscati & OceanDream

Cognitive Genocide by illogicist

a tie between

Kazablanka Says by Kazablanka

Snap Shot of my 'so called' Life by LYM

Lil Pink Submarine by Wardat_il'7leej
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Congratulation to the winners !

Second Round Poll 2005

2006-01-31T00:08:00.000+04:00

The rules are the following:

Second Round poll will last for a week (7 days).

Any individual can vote after registering at Blogger.com and replying to this post by filling in the name of their chosen blog from the following list (in alphabetical order) :
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Cognitive Genocide by illogicist

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Kazablanka Says by Kazablanka
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Lil Pink Submarine by Wardat_il'7leej

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Snap Shot of my 'so called' Life by LYM

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The Muscatis by muscati & OceanDream
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It is a must to VOTE FOR ONE BLOG ONLY. Anyone who votes for more than One blog will be totally disregarded.

p.s. Once again the vote is restricted to Blogger.com members to ensure an honest fair vote, and to avoid any misuse or abuse of a blind vote.

First Round Poll 2005

2006-01-22T23:59:00.000+04:00

The rules are the following:

The voting will take place in two (2) stages. In the first (1st) stage you vote for your top three (3) blogs from the list of all the nominated blogs.

The top five (5) blogs with the highest number of votes will get through to the second (2nd) stage where the everyone will vote for their best Omani blog from the top five finalists.

Each poll will last for a week (7 days).

Any individual can vote after registering at Blogger.com and replying to this post by writing down the names of your top there (3) Omani blogs. (not in any specific order)

Blah by Irony

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Chulupu Quick Reviews by Chulupu

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Cognitive Genocide by illogicist

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Collective Simplicity by Nameless

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Dark Notions by NiGhTFaCe

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Dawn of a new Era by NaBHaN

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Decaying into Love by iamnasra

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Food for thoughts or thoughts for food by Balqis

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Football Oman by Ali

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Hilmi's World by Hilmi

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Human Metamorphosis by Masquerader

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I Revere by Petite For Life

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The intersection of all things by Soul Rebel

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Islamic Dream By ناصر الحسني

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Journal of a twisted mind by CrazyReD

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Kamakazi wrote here by Kamakazy

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Kazablanka Says by Kazablanka

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Law & Music by Blue Chi

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Libellula by Libellula

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Lil Pink Submarine by Wardat_il'7leej

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LIP by iamnasra & Abs

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M-Pac: Oman & Beyond by M-Pac

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The Muscati's by muscati & OceanDream

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My road through Islam by Balqis

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My Rules, My Way by Namika

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My Truth by 4eva

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Myself & I in a Nutshell by kvk007

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Namika's Corner by Namika

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nezitiC by x~nezitiC

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Nomadica's Blog by nomadica

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Paradise in Me by Kay (previously known as WickeD)

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Pyradoxic Dymunds by Samyah

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Round Peg by AkaRound Peg

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Sleepless in Muscat by Ali Mehdi

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A Snap Shot of my 'so called' Life by LYM

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Sowhat by Sowhat

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The Story of Me by Noors

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Tomboys cozy little space by tomboy

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Toxic Honey by Toxic

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Tranquility by Najah

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UmQusai's Thoughts by Arabian Princess

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Violet83 by Violet83

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A Window Within Myself by iamnasra

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A Woman In Black by Woman in black

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Your Angel…Your Demon…Your Friend by DevilishAngel

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Zayed Al-Saidi by زايد السعيدي

It is a must to vote for 3 blogs. Anyone who votes for more than 3 blogs or less than 3 blog will be totally disregarded.

p.s. The vote is restricted to Blogger.com members to ensure an honest fair vote, and to avoid any misuse or abuse of a blind vote.

Review

2006-01-01T15:01:00.000+04:00

We launched the voting session for the nominees, however some members of the Omani blog community expressed that not enough blogs were included in the voting list. Therefore, hereby is an extended time period to nominate any other blogs for the contest. Also pls feel free to suggest any other alterations you find suitable for this contest. Pls bear in mind that some blog owners might not like to be included in this contest. For example, I myself did not nominate my blog coz I am not very active lately in blogging. All suggustions, n recommendations are very much welcomed. We do appreciate your positive contribution to make this contest a success. Thank you

TheWeek article on the Omani Blog Award 2005

2005-12-18T14:51:00.000+04:00

TheWeek magazine published an article on our Omani Blog Awards in their 145 issue. You can find it at the site below; Section 2: news.

http://www.freetheweek.com/download.asp

Nomination Stage Completed

2005-12-04T03:13:00.000+04:00

Thanks for all of you that nominated blogs to enter into our next stage. The committee of the awards will now put the submissions in separate categories so that visitors can vote for the winners in each category.

Submit Your Blog

2005-11-16T19:17:00.000+04:00

The nomination stage of the awards has now started. Please post a comment under this entry with the name and URL of your blog and other blog that you think should enter the awards. The qualification requirements for the nominees could be read at the post below.

The awards committee will sort all the entries and put them in separate categories for the voting to take palce in December.

Please help us spread the word and do submit your own blog as well.

Good luck to everyone!

NOMINATION PERIOD CLOSED - 3/12/05

Members of The Committee

2005-09-13T09:05:00.000+04:00

The members of The Omani Blog Awards Committee:

Committee Roles

2005-08-30T21:01:00.000+04:00

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

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

Qualification

2005-08-25T16:20:00.000+04:00

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

Arabic and English weblogs quality.
The author must be Omani. A non-Omani resident in Oman may qualify as long as his weblog is related to Oman somehow.
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.)
The blog should have a minimum of 20 posts.

Categories

2005-08-25T16:19:00.000+04:00

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

2005-08-25T16:17:00.000+04:00

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.

OBA Linking Buttons

2005-08-23T19:15:00.000+04:00

I did not really think that so many people would get excited about the awards! Please help spread the word even more about the Omani Blog Awards by using one of these images to link to this website from your blog.

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<a href="http://oba2005.blogspot.com"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v444/blue_chi/oman_blogs.gif" border="0"></a>

(Copy the HTML code of your favourite image and paste it somewhere in your blog template.)

Welcome to the Omani Blog Awards 2005

2005-08-21T23:20:00.000+04:00

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:

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.
It would functions as an incentive for bloggers to look after and update their weblogs even more.
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?