Wales’ first ever Blog Awards are launched
Wales Business — By Duncan Higgitt on June 3, 2010 9:55 am
Entries are now open
WALES’ first ever Blog Awards has been launched today, to mark the growing number of bloggers in Wales. The event aims to award those writing creative and interesting blogs on a range of subjects including politics, fashion and their local community.
Bloggers are able to enter their own work or nominate the blogs they enjoy reading.
The categories include:
- Best Welsh Language Blog
- Best Writing on a Blog
- Best Political Blog
- Best Community Blog
- Best Lifestyle Blog
- Best Technology Blog
- Best Sports Blog
There will also be an overall award for the Best Blog. Most award categories are sponsored and prizes will be awarded to the winners.
The award ceremony will take place in October in south Wales.
Judging the awards will be Ed Walker, the online communities editor at Media Wales and editor of YourCardiff and Hannah Waldram, the Guardian’s Cardiff Beat Blogger. They will be joined by Wynford Emanuel, director of Warwick Emanuel PR, which is organising the event, and WalesHome.org’s Daran Hill, who will be judging the Best Political Blog category. This site will also be sponsoring the prize.
Ed moved to Cardiff earlier this year to work for Media Wales. He said: “I saw that there was a huge amount of blogging and social media activity here so we held a bloggers meet up in Cardiff in March to provide local bloggers with an opportunity to meet each other and share experiences. Around 40 showed up at the initial meeting, all of varying levels of ability, and since then we’ve held another , where even more turned up.
“Welsh bloggers are keen to do more to get their work recognised and we thought an awards ceremony would be the perfect way to do this. We hope that the Wales Blog Awards will become an annual event.”
Entries to the Wales Blog Awards can be made via the website, and the competition is open to anyone who runs a non-professional blog and lives in, or writes about Wales.
Organiser of the awards, Cardiff-based Warwick Emanuel PR, was set up in 2001 by business partners Elizabeth Warwick and Wynford Emanuel. The company specialises in the energy, utility, public sector and business to business sectors. In 2008, it launched a new media business which includes producing corporate films, news podcasts for clients and providing expert advice on the best means of implementing social networking activities into their campaigns.
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11 Comments
Actually we (I and a range of other bloggers) did a Welsh blog awards in 2007, so “first ever” is misleading.
Simon, were they political only? The memory cheats or fades
It had mostly non-political categories with anyone and everyone voting for their favourites. Pity I deleted it. but It was too much trouble for one person to organize and impossible to prevent people from casting multiple votes, which is why I ditched it and came up instead with the Welsh Politico the following year.
Good luck to the team behind this project. I should have congratulated them on getting this together in my previous comment but I was only half-awake at the time (I should also have said “incorrect” rather than “misleading”). Anyway, if there’s some kind of ceremony at the end then it will be Wales’ first proper blog awards.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for your comments, we did see there was a Welsh blog awards in 2007 – via some google searches – we were under the impression it was a political blog awards. If we’re mistaken I do apologise for the inaccuracy in the release we’ve put out.
We do plan to have a small ceremony to announce the winners, would be great to have you along – please drop me a line – ed.walker@mediawales.co.uk
We’re not planning to have public voting, instead the public can nominate blogs and a panel of judges will decide the winners. As you alluded to, it’s difficult to stop multiple votes and it’s bias towards those blogs with large readerships (or lots of friends!).
Thanks for your support.
Ed Walker
Media Wales
Just a note to back up Simon – I remember the 2007 contest well, I had a non-political blog in one of the ‘anorak’ categories, and won the first round of voting in my category by a country mile, but fell behind in the final round ;-(
It would be nice if there was a way for the 2010 organisers to acknowledge the 2007 contest in some way – I know that a fair bit of work went into doing the 2007 vote.
Ok, will raise this with the organisers
How sad. Not only are Welsh language blogs treated as a fringe category, but Welsh language comments aren’t allowed on the website either. What an utter shambles. As creator of the Welsh Blog Awards I refuse to permit Media Wales’ to use that name for their awards. Instead I will , once again, organise a Welsh Blog Awards this year, and show these overpaid imbeciles how it is done.
Overpaid?
I acknowledge and bear further witness that Simon was indeed the FIRST to run a blogging award in Wales. Very nice graphics too. But we at Cambria Politico stake our claim for the SECOND blogging award with the extremely prestigious and desirable accolade of the Sauregurkenzeit Award . For the cognoscenti, the details of this can be found … HERE .
We will do it again… er… probably not!
Overpaid?
I did it for free.
You can see the REAL Welsh Blog Awards 2010 HERE
The Wales Blog Awards 2010 are being run for free – no one is getting paid to organise/take part/put on the night. The whole event is being organised on a voluntary basis. Just to point out.