Vancouver weekly blog awards; award ceiling

I just tallied the votes for this week’s Vancouver Election Blog Awards. The four winners are the same as last week, but awards have shifted a little – see ballot. Thank you all participants!

Going forward, you’ll see on the ballot that I decided to revert the award ceiling from $150 back down to the $100 that we were using through July 14. I think of the ceiling as training wheels which I’d like to remove eventually. In this early experimental stage of the blog awards, funding is limited to what I can afford. So publicity is limited, partly because the award pool doesn’t motivate enough publicity from the bloggers. As a result, our voter sample is probably not broad enough to be representative of all Vancouverites. But when I pitch for foundation funding, I’d like to show preliminary results that are more reflective of how the awards would work out with a broader voter sample.

To see what effect the ceiling had, I tried raising it for a while. Ideally, I’d like to give voters as much power as possible, including the freedom to allocate awards any way they want. But for now I think this bicycle is tilting too far, so I’ve lowered the training wheels back down.

By the way, we also plan to attract and retain more voters by building a new ballot with features like the latest headline from each media/blog.

I welcome your comments and suggestions on all this!