The so-called BOB awards (best of the Blogs) are finally concluded, and the results, as suspected, have absolutely nothing to do with having a useful or well designed and presented Blog site. Its fairly apparent that the BOB awards are all about ballot-stuffing. They remind me of those bikini "model" contests, where girls on MySpace broadcast messages every hour in a desperate plea for votes as if it will somehow transform them into a real model if they get the most votes.
The winner of the best overall blog is PINAC, which stands for "Photography Is Not a Crime". Its an interesting blog, if you have issues with law enforcement, but calling it the best blog in South Florida is a little bit scary, to be honest. Is it really possible that a blog about someone's struggle fighting for his right to photograph anyone he wants without restriction (particularly police) is the most interesting or useful Blog in South Florida? Even if it was the most elegant, objective and well-written site on the planet (which its not), the subject matter is of interest to such a small percentage of people that it seems impossible that it could win an overall Best Blog award.
The "best" food blog winner was worstpizza.com, which is more of a commentary on the influence of twitter than it is on the quailty of the site. Its not a bad site, but there are some really good food blogs in South Florida (including this one) which are a lot more useful to South Floridians than worstpizza.com.
PINAC was whining that they had been overtaken in the final hours and that the BOBs were just a popularity contest; and then they ended up winning after all. The truth is that the BOBs are not a popularity contest. They are a joke.
First of all, the rules for entering the Best South Florida Blog awards contest don't require that you live in South Florida or that your blog be about anything having to do with South Florida. The nomination process is wholly ridiculous; virtually any blog could be nominated. I suspect that virtually all of the sites that participated nominated themselves. I also suspect that the Sun-Sentinel didn't spend a lot of man hours vetting any of the nominations.
But the real joke is the voting. Its clear that fairness or objectivity was not the goal with the voting rules; it was about forcing thousands of people to go to the Sun-Sentinel web site every day to vote. But the voting is totally uncontrolled. You could literally stuff an unlimited number of votes for your own blog, rendering the results completely meaningless, as a "popularity contest" or anything else.
The Sun-Sentinel requires that you create an account in order to vote, and that only one vote is allowed per account. Of course you only need an email account to create an account, so with yahoo and google we all know you can create an unlimited number of accounts. If you want to try to limit people from using more than one account from their home computer, you could restrict the votes to one per IP address. This penalizes people who are in companies or groups where all users are sharing an address, but that's another article. But the IP check doesn't work in modern times. Every time you turn on your cell phone you get a new address. You can change the MAC address on your home PC and get a new address from Comcast. So virtually anyone who understand how things work could cast an unlimited number of votes.
So what does this mean for Bob awards? It means that they're meaningless. If you figure that anyone who has a chance to win cheated at least a little bit, the winners are likely those who cheated the most.
BOB awards are a bit like steroids in baseball. It was easy to cheat, and you know that some did, so even if you didn't cheat nobody who understands how things work will believe you won fairly.
So what's the point? I don't know, which is exactly why I didn't even bother to enter. I could have won, without getting one single vote from anyone other than myself, because I know how. But to me, life isn't rewarding unless the accolades are genuine. The only real reward is when someone who has been enriched by your words or advice gives genuine thanks for you help. That's what its all about.