Kevin Aylward makes a surprising announcement. Guess I’ll have to settle for “nominee with a boatload of nominations“.
Update – The 2009 Weblog Awards are off
It is with a great deal of regret that I must inform everyone that The 2009 Weblog Awards are canceled.
Unfortunately the resources required to handle the load of voting (nearly 1,000,000 votes in 2008) could not be adequately provisioned. Even if the servers and bandwidth required appeared today it would be at least a few weeks before everything could be ready for voting.
This has always been a very, very labor intensive process, and in recent years with our success a very expensive competition to run. It’s hard to have unlimited resources provisioned for seven days of voting. In the past we’ve had to provision expensive servers for several months to prepare for the crush of voting.
We really tried to solve the resource problems with new ideas (such as cloud computing) this year, but ultimately we were not able to make things work to our satisfaction. I’m very proud of the voting platform we built for The Weblog Awards over the years, and the quality voting experience we’ve been able to deliver. The one thing I will not do is compromise that voting experience.
Rather than run a competition that had a high possibility of technically failing, the more prudent choice seemed to be regroup and consider our alternatives for hosting these awards going forward.
Thank you to those who have supported The Weblog Awards over the years, we appreciate your support, and our sorry we couldn’t make things work this year.
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Too bad. This is the year that WUWT would have crushed the competition.
Greater than 10^6 votes is a problem? How does this blog manage to function? How many days to handle that many hits here?
Good, it was a real pain voting every day on every computer, just to out ballot stuff the skeptics!
[Reply: During the voting last year Anthony repeatedly warned everyone to avoid ballot stuffing, automated programs, or anything similar. WUWT won the “Best Science” category fair and square. ~dbs]
[REPLY – But it appears obvious that certain opponents of WUWT did not play fair and square! ~ Evan]
I will ask the editors at Examiner.com if they are willing to host the awards this year.
Happy New Year everyone!
It seems that the climatgate continues… now they are shutting down the weblog awards to try to cut down this fantastic blog’s popularity, WUWT. But the news is out and WUWT will dominate, even withtout a weblog award.
Note: the above opinion is just a hypothesis.
An incovenient reality perhaps?
This seems really odd. Today’s servers ought to be able to handle millions of hits without breaking a sweat. I built a server application that runs the company I work for. It easily handles four to five million hits per day, and it’s a very database-intensive application. It’s not just a bunch of static content being served up. The whole thing, web server and database, runs on a single dual-processor box that’s at least three years old. It’s pretty odd that lack of hardware is the reason behind not having the contest.
2010. Mankind loses ability to perform webvoting.
I think it’s honest, the blogossphere has really grown beyond all expectations.
Now come the time where the blogs are accepted as a fundemental part in a democratic and open society, we don’t really need those “popularity tests”!
Many thanks to Anthony and other bloggers who have made this breakethrough!
Well , you can’t win them all , but nearly 31 million hits should tell you something .
Somebody had given a link a whie ago to a request to the organizers to exclude CA and WATTSUPWITHAT from the vote as not being “scientific”.
The request was not surprising, but the reply was. He was bending over backwards to convince the one requesting it that he was neutral and would be keeping a close eye on the eligibility etc.
Could it be that with the huge traffic of this blog they did not want it to come up first again?
Sorry to hear this !!!
But we all do know who deserves what !!!!!
They canceled an entire award because they didn’t want you to be the winner. Shame on them.
REPLY: more likely is that it wasn’t making a return on investment. It was sponsor and ad supported…and it was a lot of manual labor – Anthony
“Håkan B (11:47:34) :
I think it’s honest, the blogossphere has really grown beyond all expectations.”
Oh come on, you rent a few more servers and that’s that. Look at the nominations list, ClimateAudit and WUWT are all over the place. Somebody’s pulling strings.
Doug, Nice troll baiting. Now go find Al Gore a new conference to bury under a blizzard.
This is at times a very “un” blog. Anthony runs this place by the rules of decency and rational discourse, which separates him from Real Climate and their peers. I believe the weblog awards were too susceptible to vote stuffing and I am not disappointed the awards will not happen this year. Anthony’s ever increasing page views are the real votes.
Blogs come from book-logs…it it a “farenheit 451” the next step or the removal of that statue at the NY harbor….?
Look at it this way: You won the title at least two years in a row.
Congratulations!
anna v (11:50:15) :
“Somebody had given a link a whie ago to a request to the organizers to exclude CA and WATTSUPWITHAT from the vote as not being ‘scientific’.”
Yet they put Pharyngula – a hate filled atheist blog – into the “science” category.
Is this one of those “I’d rather delete the data rather than turn it over” type moments?
I’ll continue to vote for you by reading your blog daily. Thanks for all of the hard work. mdl
DirkH (11:47:19) :
“2010. Mankind loses ability to perform webvoting.”
This is what democrats do when its obvious they’re going to lose an election: they blame the technology.
From Basketball Players Who Caused Rule Changes, by Ron Kurtus (16 March 2006)
http://www.school-for-champions.com/sports/basketball_rule_changes.htm
When Lew Alcindor started playing basketball in college for UCLA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) officials felt that he was too dominant a player — one who could dunk the ball at will. They felt he would be unstoppable, so they changed the rules to forbid dunking in college games. This was called the “Alcindor Rule.”
After he graduated from college, the rule was rescinded, and players were allowed to dunk again. (It makes you wonder about the qualifications of those NCAA officials.)
As a result of the rule, Alcindor developed a good hook shot, which he used effectively during his playing days in college and the NBA. He later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
… and became the all-time leading scorer in the NBA.
So I wouldn’t worry too much about the “WUWT Rule”.
My favorite Coach Wooden quote: Talent is God given; be humble. Fame is man given; be thankful. Conceit is self given; be careful. — Kar33m Abdul-Jabbar
Why vote anyway?… the web traffic of blogs would be sufficient to decide the awards. Those data a round table of “independent” individuals would suffice.
So anyone need any more proof that you don’t live in a free country? Anyone? come on just one? Weblog awards Pah! what a crock. This blog is kicking ass and THEY cant let that become a matter of record so overwhelming to make the proles sit up and see the forest. Once the powers that be run out of bullshit compelling enough to serve there program of lies THEY WILL FALL. Soon folks… Very soon. Enjoy the show.
Smokey (12:02:39) :
“Yet they put Pharyngula – a hate filled atheist blog – into the “science” category.”
Debunking creationists and religious nutters that want to teach children pseudo science instead of biology does seem quite valid as a science orientated blog. I don’t see any difference between that and the new age religion of AGW debunking going on here and other similar places.