I’ve completed my reviews for the 2014 Best Construction Blog competition. Your votes over the next few weeks will set the course for the finalist judging process.
When voting concludes on March 31, our independent judges will review the top seven blogs and decide on the best construction blog. Popular vote certainly is important in the decision. Clearly, bloggers who can find a spot on the first page of the real-time voting list have been able to attract enough interest and support to be worthy of evaluation. But if we relied only on popular vote, we would have different kind of problem. Some bloggers can “game” the system by pushing every button (including some unrelated to blog quality) to win votes; others belong to larger corporations with internal email systems, who can ask employees to vote for their own blog. (One year I tried to restrict voting to one vote per IP address, but this had the unintended opposite effect of denying some well-written blogs from achieving popular vote success, because as soon as a single employee voted for the blog in his or her office, everyone else at that location was shut out of the competition.)
When judging starts in early April, judges can access the popular vote, but focus on other topics including design quality, relevance, frequency of updating, and reliability. The judges vote independently of each other, with a rating system, that allows us to tabulate the best overall blog.
Right, now, if you are a blogger or someone who wants a blog to win, please feel free to get out the vote. This is most important if you are on the cusp of getting into the top ranks. You don’t need to be number one in popular vote (though the blog with that status will receive special recognition); just be effective in discovering votes to get to the home page.
When you vote, I ask for your name and email address, which are loaded on a special list for this competition. We’ll send you a couple of emails, one as the voting concludes and the second when we announce the finalist. That’s it. We won’t spam you with additional emails.
