Black Weblog Awards

The Black Weblog Awards was an online awards event which recognized bloggers of African-American descent for their contributions in blogging, video blogging, and podcasting.

About

The Black Weblog Awards started in 2005 with 11 categories, and grew to as many as 36 categories before my exit. There were participants from over 90 countries, making it one of the most widespread Internet award events for Black bloggers.

People were able to nominate their favorite blogs, and from the pool of nominees came the finalists for each category (based on the number of nominations for each finalists). Each category featured two winners: a "Popular Vote" and a "Judges' Vote", which was chosen from the entire pool of nominees by a panel of esteemed Internet experts and personalities.

Former Black Weblog Award winners are now household names and cultural mainstays, including Baratunde Thurston, Patrice Grell Yursik ("Afrobella"), Luvvie Ajayi Jones, Keith Boykin, D-Nice, Kanye West, Questlove, and Tyra Banks. Other Black Weblog Award winners have also appeared in traditional media outlets, such as The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and NPR.

The Work

The general structure of nominees, finalists and winners were borrowed from other awards events, such as the Academy Awards or Emmys. Everything else was created on the fly as the event transpired, so each year brought on different challenges.

The Black Weblog Awards website was first just a group of static HTML pages. In 2006, the site was migrated to Textpattern, a simple CMS. Later versions of the website were migrated to WordPress for security and ease of use by multiple people.

At its core, the Black Weblog Awards was powered by web forms. For the first five years of the event, Wufoo was used to collect nominations from the public. Wufoo also provided spam prevention tools and reporting features, which allowed me to quickly tally nominations for finalists and Popular Vote winners. For later years, before the sale, we used a custom-built software solution.

I used the metrics from nominated categories to determine their popularity from year to year. Less popular categories were phased out, new categories were introduced based on general Internet trends and user feedback, and category descriptions were often changed to ensure they were clear and unambiguous.

I was responsible for recruiting judges for the Black Weblog Awards. Starting in 2006, each year featured a jury of 10 judges. I used simple Excel spreadsheets in order to collect their votes, and in 2008, we moved to a custom-built software solution which would allow them to submit their votes themselves along with any comments.

Throughout the Black Weblog Awards, I was responsible for all the branding and design work for the Black Weblog Awards, including creating ad banners, winners graphics, and other promo material. I also wrote and edited all the copy. In 2006, I utilized some third-party help for some design work, which later had to be changed due to copyright issues.

Conclusion

The Black Weblog Awards was a great success, with web traffic quadrupling year after year. The Black Weblog Awards inspired similar awards events during our tenure, and even led to the addition of Black bloggers, some of whom were Black Weblog Award Winners, as a recurring segment (“Bloggers’ Roundtable) in one of NPR's most popular shows at the time, “News and Notes”.

In 2011, I made a successful exit from the Black Weblog Awards, and it was purchased by GEMPIRE Interactive. They expanded the event into a live awards show with celebrity presenters and physical trophies. I stayed on and served as an advisor for future installments of the Black Weblog Awards, often delivering an annual “Chairman Emeritus” speech at the event.

The final installment of the Black Weblog Awards happened in 2017.

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