Diet, Cooking, and Exercise: Results of the Judging-Aussiejourno’s Weekly Blog Awards

As the first guest judge, and the first judge from the Northern Hemisphere, I completed my judging duties yesterday and am posting the results here. When David McMahon invited me to judge, he said that his criteria were readability, photographs and/or image content, and the x-factor which could be a great headline, witty remark or something else that caught his eye and tickled his brain. I added consistency of theme, relevance, title catchiness, accuracy, and the use of keywords.

It wasn’t easy to visit and rate 53 blogs, especially with so many good ones. In typical teacher fashion, I created a spreadsheet with my criteria across the top and the blog links down the left-hand column and entered my subjective rating from one to ten under each of the criteria for each of the blogs, totaled the numbers, and sorted from highest to lowest. Thus, I gave the appearance of objectivity to a purely subjective endeavor. I had a few ties and had to revisit those blogs in order to break the tie.

I gave higher scores to blogs with current content (posts in the last week) and, after making allowances for blogspeak, I did consider grammar and spelling. When I am visiting blogs, I frequently browse the tags, or labels that the authors have given their own posts in order to quickly see what they are about. So, I gave more credit to blogs with effective tags.

This was an impossible yet rewarding experience for me. It’s impossible to rank the personal thoughts and experiences of others, but taking a stab at it exposed me to the various ways other bloggers choose to present themselves to world and what they value and find interesting in their own lives. I had the feeling when I was doing it and that I was being slightly voyeuristic, and was sitting squarely in the eye of this postmodern phenomenon, the blogosphere.

Here are my rankings.