By now the voting on the 2006 Catholic Blog Awards is over (or is scheduled to be over). I don’t yet know whether I won anything, because I am writing this in advance and am going to be out of town on the day that the voting closes.
I want to thank all who supported the blog in the various categories it was nominated for. I really appreciate your support. This blog is a labor of love for me, and to have people express the value they see in it by voting for it is an incentive to keep going.
I also want to thank CyberCatholics for hosting the awards. I know that they did a LOT of behind the scenes work to get the awards done, and they did it amid very difficult conditions, including major Internet connectivity, bandwidth problems, and data loss in one category. So a big thank you to them as well.
That being said, I think that there were some problems with the way the awards were conducted this year, and these should be addressed in the future.
In particular, there was the vote once per day thing.
The Catholic Blog Awards page explaind that this was "to keep voting fair." How this could serve to keep voting fair is something that I did not understand. So I asked, and I was told that the reason that this was implemented was to allow people who share a single IP address to both vote (e.g., a husband and wife who have a single computer with a cable modem, or the people in an office or school who share the same IP).
Unfortunately, this was not explained on the voting page. It also doesn’t really put married couples, schools, and offices on the same footing as single people, since in the course of the week of voting a single person would have seven theoretical votes to cast, while a married couple, school, or office would have seven votes to split between them.
Since the voting page simply explained thing in terms of one vote per day, the potential positive effect of this was blunted in that it encouraged single people to exercise their extra votes just as much as those sharing an IP.
It also put the nominated bloggers in a really delicate position.
As soon as I learned about this aspect of the voting, I hated it. I realized that some bloggers would take the "Vote early and often" line, which would (a) come across as unseemly to the readers and (b) would give those bloggers an advantage over those who wanted to stick to the "one person, one vote" principle and this (c) could lead to bad blood between the two groups of bloggers, which is the antithesis of what should happen in the Catholic blogging community.
Since I was one of the "one person, one vote" bloggers, I sat back for several days and didn’t mention the possibility of multiple votes.
Until I started losing in the one category I was most interested in (Best Apologetics) because my principal competition in that category started using the "Vote early, vote often" line.
Now, I know some folks have taken the attitude that this is all in fun and these awards don’t mean anything, and that’s a very easy position to take if you aren’t one of the nominees. But if you’ve invested a lot of personal time and effort in building something that people see enough value in to nominate then it does mean something to you. Receiving recognition for all your hard work is important.
That’s not vanity. That’s an expression of an aspect of basic human nature. People need recognition for their efforts. That’s true in marriages and in friendships and in job situations and in blogging. Recognition is incentive to keep going.
This year one of the ways the Catholic blogging community could give recognition to bloggers who have worked hard was through these awards, and there was one category in particular that I have a special interest in because of my profession.
So when I saw the "vote early, vote often" meme looking like it would unbalance the results in that category, I reluctantly decided to point out this aspect of the rules. That way the blogs were put back on an equal footing.
Which is required if the results are to mean anything at all.
Unfortunately, the multiple votes thing of itself diminishes the meaningfulness of the results. It doesn’t deprive them of all meaning because if a blog’s readers are enthusiastic enough to cast multiple votes then that says something about the blog.
But it doesn’t say as much as if the awards had been conducted under the "one person, one vote" principle.
It was thus with great reluctance that I eventually said to myself, "Well, this is the way the rules are this year. I didn’t choose that. I would have opposed it if I had been asked about it. But that’s the way it is, and if these results are to mean anything then the rules need to be pointed out."
I also left my comboxes open in the two posts where I pointed it out, and I took my lumps, as people accused me to my face (virtually speaking) of "vanity" and "egregious self-promotion," and said deliberately cruel things like I "do not deserve" particular awards or that my pointing out the multiple-vote rule and saying mild things like "Please support JimmyAkin.Org" caused them to vote against me.
I noticed other bloggers turning off the comboxes in posts where they pointed to the multiple-vote aspect of the rules, and I can understand why. The kind of reaction I got when I left them on underscores the problem with the multiple-vote rule.
In all this I was trying to do the best I could in a bad situation. I didn’t want to criticize the rule while the voting was still underway since that would serve no purpose (the rule couldn’t be changed once it was announced), but I wanted to thank those who voted for the blog, and I felt y’all deserved a public explanation of where I stand on the multiple-vote rule.
I appreciate the Catholic Blog Awards, but the multiple-vote rule needs to be altered in some way to avoid the problems that were encountered with it this year.
At the same time, I want to reiterate my thanks to those who put on and ran the awards this year. I know that they had a tremendously difficult job, and I want to give them full credit for the efforts they put in.
WHOA!
