A number of important announcements:1. We have decided to push the voting back to January 9th. From January 2nd until this time, the nominated blogs will be displayed on the Jerusalem Post site, allowing readers to casually visit these blogs by clicking on their hyperlinks. This is conducive to the main aim of the awards – to increase general awareness of, and exposure to, Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel blogs.
The amended timeline is thus:
Jan 9th – 19th: Preliminary voting round on JPost.com
Jan 24th – Feb 2nd: Final voting round on JPost.com
Feb 7th: Winners announced.
Jan 24th – Feb 2nd: Final voting round on JPost.com
Feb 7th: Winners announced.
2. We have decided to relax the category requirements, due to the preponderance of nominated blogs that do not fit snugly into any one category, but do somehow deal with topics fitting into multiple categories (an issue that many of you raised with me). Thus, for a nominated blog to be eligible for a category, it need only deal with the relevant topic (e.g. politics, personal, culture, religion) to a more than insignificant extent (rather than the former requirement of dealing predominantly with the topic). This is an entirely subjective test, based on general impression, and the determination will be made by the Jerusalem Post and myself.
3. Finally, many of you have stumbled upon a Jerusalem Post test page showing the final cut of “nominees.” Some of you even posted a link to it. This is not the final page, nor does it show the final list of nominees. It is merely a test page used by the Post to experiment with some formats. Many of the shown blogs may not be in the final cut, and some other blogs may be included, after we have evaluated their eligiblity and nomination link format requirements.
Please do not email me to ask why you did not make the final cut. Either your nominations were not in the correct format, or you did not fit the category.
