As you may or may not know, I won an award for best domain blog at THE Domain Conference last month. Firstly, thanks for that recognition. Whether the award is deserved or not, I appreciate this recognition. From my perspective, I don’t think I have done anything different or better this year than in other years.
If I were to guess, I think this particular category may have been influenced by voting in other categories. In at least a couple of categories, I saw (and heard about) people and companies who asked for support from clients, associates, friends…etc. There is nothing wrong with that, especially if the winner could benefit from winning. When these nominees received votes, their voters also likely selected a blogger of the year, whether they cared about the category or not. I am sure I benefitted from this.
I did notsubmit any nominations or cast a ballot this year. It wasn’t out of protest or anything like that, but I didn’t feel comfortable making individual nominations since there are many deserving people and companies. When it came time for the final vote, I forgot to email a ballot.
For those people who were upset about seeing the same names year after year, I have a piece of advice: submit your nominations! There are lots of people who deserve recognition for being successful and/or contributing positively to the domain industry. I think my nomination for “Developer of the Year” award (which I declined) shows that anyone can nominate anyone for anything, even if it makes no sense. If you think someone is deserving, nominate them. One reason I write about the nomination period every year is so people know they can participate. If you don’t nominate people, you shouldn’t complain about the same people being nominated every year because it won’t change unless you change it.
Getting back to the topic at hand… the best blog / blogger category. In my (biased) opinion, there are many great choices. I read almost all of the domain blogs listed on Domaining.com. I read some of these blogs daily and some I read occasionally. The people who operate these blogs share a wealth of information that would be difficult to learn if it weren’t for their sharing. Some bloggers share based on their experiences and others help to uncover and report on news and industry topics of interest. Some blogs do a little bit of everything.
I don’t agree with what everyone writes, and I don’t love everyone’s style of writing, but I do think domain investors are fortunate to have a diverse group of people sharing information at no cost to them. Likewise, I think we also benefit from having domain forums for people to share news, opinions, and other insight that was once not publicly available. Yes, most bloggers benefit from advertising revenue (thanks, advertisers!), so obviously you should keep that in mind when reading. The same goes for reading anything. Just about everyone has conflicts.
I appreciate the fact that some people felt I was deserving of the industry Blogger of the Year award. I think we are lucky that there are so many people sharing information and insight.
Sidenote: Comments are off. I didn’t write this to receive congrats/props nor do I want to read criticism about the awards or process. Easiest thing to do is to turn off comments. Sorry.
