International Blog Cup

First of all I have to apologise that there were no posts lately - especially because it was the final week of the competition. I didn’t and still won’t have a decent Internet connection for the following week, but as it looks like IBC can run on “auto-pilot” very well :) 

Congratulations to the 1st winner of IBC - Peter Andre and his blog! Number of votes shows that I was not actively promoting the competition in the last week. It was also evident during the whole 1st IBC that there were only the major blogs competing as they were not interested or were not able to inform their readers that they are competing in the IBC.

I expect higher number of votes and more interesting competition as a whole during the 2nd IBC that will start in a few days.

Thanks to everyone who voted again!

We have done some development on iBlogCup.com page lately. First of all - the voting system was corrected so that it is not possible to accidentally link visitors to directly vote for some blog. Another change was that we no longer accept E-Cards Blog Cup nominations as there was very little interest in this tematic Blog Cup nominations. Therefore we moved already nominated blogs to general IBC nominations and will be competing in the 2nd and 3rd IBC (November and December 2007).

As it all looks like we will hold our first thematic Blog Cup in December, because there is not enough entrants to hold the SEO/Marketing bloggers competition already in November.

You might have already noticed that it is already possible to see the entrants of the 2nd IBC at http://iBlogCup.com/blogCup2/main.php.

Semi-finals of the 1st IBC are still not over. It seems it will be very tight between Peterandrej and Read/WriteBlog.  So don’t forget to vote for your favourites.

After 15 days of voting we reached semi-final pairs at International Blog Cup. The remaining blogs are:

Boing Boing vs. TMZ.com

Peterandrej vs. ReadWriteWeb

Don’t forget to vote and nominate your blogs for the 2nd International Blog Cup that starts in November!

It all looked set for ProBlogger to win the 1st International Blog Cup competition, but as it looks like this will not happen. It looks like we will have to wait at least until the 2nd IBC to see ProBlogger winning the competition as Darren from ProBlogger decided to withdraw his blog from IBC. You can read more in his update to his initial post on IBC.

I really regret that he will not compete anymore, but I will respect his wish to withdraw ProBlogger from the 1st IBC. There are still a few nomination places for 2nd IBC, so you can still nominate ProBlogger if you like it and think that it should win the competition.

You can still see and vote for Darren’s blog (I dind’t think of withdrawals when creating the website:), but it will be replaced by Peter Andre’s blog even in case it gets more votes.

It has been a long night for me as I got married yesterday, but it was really nice to see a recent visitor explosion to iBlogCup.com this morning. As you might have seen - ProBlogger is sending a huge amount of new iBlogCup fans our way and I would like to thank him and of course all other blogs (especially Peter Andre’s blog who is up against ProBlogger in this round) for helping IBC to become a comeptition that every blogger would like to win.

It is also nice to see that voters from ProBlogger seem to vote for other blogs they like, too. I just hope that all other blogs, remaining in the competition, will join the campaign of promoting the IBC as this would make the finals rounds really interesting.

Among comments on Darren’s IBC post I noticed a reader’s comment going like this: “This is a wonderful idea, but poorly managed and under developed, I think.”

I have to completely agree here. IBC is far from some good looking professional website at the moment. But there are a few things I would like to state here:

1. IBC is mainly run by a single person who is not a native speaker and I’m sorry for the English on the website and here.

2. I’m also fairly new to the webmastering/blogging/design business as I’m a programmer originally.

But of course I like constructive critics and will always be open for the comments and new ideas for improvement of IBC.

Greg

iBlogCup.com

After another short round of voting we have the new winners that managed to fight it through to the Quarter Finals of International Blog Cup. As you can see below it was interesting round again with slightly more votes than in the first round. We had only one case where earlier nominated blog advanced, although both (PerezHilton and Seth’s Blog) had the same number of votes.

You can see detailed results and vote for Round 3 pairs at 1stIBC Page.

After some minor troubles just after midnight, 1st International Blog Cup is running smoothly again. We are already in the second round and there are only 16 top blogs left. Unfortunately there were 3 situations where both blogs had the same number of votes and the highest seeded blog advanced to the second round. This way Gizmodo, Ars Technica and ProBlogger were promoted, while Techcrunch, Mashable! and Think Progress were lower placed on the nominations list and will have to try winning the Blug Cup next time. The highest number of votes was achieved by Read/Write Web and Peter Andre Jensen’s Blog.

As already said there are 16 blogs competing in the second round of IBC competition. Here is a list of blogs that managed to survive the first round:

Don’t forget to vote and/or nominate your favourites for 2nd IBC or some of Thematic Blog Cups!

The 1st International Blog Cup finally started yesterday and you were able to cast your votes. After a few minor troubles in the first hour of voting everything seems to work ok for now. But since we cannot speak about enormous traffic :), we should wait and see how the system performs under some heavier load. It doesn’t seem appropriate to speak about favourites after first day of voting since only a small number of people voted for their favourite blogs. We also noticed that most people are voting just for their own (i.e. a single blog). It is allowed and you are encouraged to vote for other top blogs also. After all it is also possible to “vote against” blogs you think will be dangerous to meet in the later stages of this knock-out based competition. Nobody can tell you that you mustn’t do that, although it would be fair to vote for blogs based on their quality.

After all you are here to choose the ultimate blog that deserves the 1st International Blog Cup Winner title.

Enjoy the competition!