no deiss – i don’t give a deiss2 min read

personal: yesterday i almost pulled a deiss . i was so fed up that i almost walked out on the whole swiss blog awards mess. the dissing and the bickering simply got to be too frustrating.

but no dice! i don’t give a deiss.

we have been massivly critisised for how we organised this first edition of the swiss blog awards. our shortcomings and flaws have been very much in the center of the attention. one guy went as far as writing an open letter to our sponsors asking them to retire reconsider their support.

of course this did not leave me indifferent, self-piting mess that i am.

but then i had a good think and realised that for me personally i am still convinced of the formula that we came up with for this 1. edition of sbaw; i am positive that it could have worked exactly the way we designed it. fact is, it did not work – or to be more precise, it worked, but only in one part of our country – and as a result we do not have any blogs from romandie nominated.

we had and have valid reasons for organising the awards exactly the way we did. we wanted the swiss blog awards to be community driven, bottom up, uncomplicated; it was to be an award for bloggers organised by bloggers, promoted and carried by bloggers. after all this is how many online projects succeed, or don’t they? think of the memes, the hypes, peer-2-peer, virals. internet projects work by word-of-mouth. i mean, did you have to convince anyone to pro-actively register their blog @ technorati? did you have to force anyone to join flickr?

some of the frustrated, underrepresented bloggers now demand quotas for minorities. it is one possibility. we had even discussed this option. but i often think of quotas as institutionalised victim mentality. i am aware, that this is not a very politically correct thing to say. but aren’t bloggers generally speaking very good at getting their voices heard, at networking and spreading the word? so is it not strange that these self-motivated self-publication-systems and pr-machines now demand a quota for minorities? i think it is. but we shall see…

we always said, that we will evaluate all this afterwards in order to improve things and to find the best possible formula for such an award in our linguistically complicated country [i almost said challenged lol! switzerland is a linguistically-challenged country!].

disclaimer: even though i am one of the organisers of the swiss blog awards the opinions voiced here are my personal viewpoints and have nothing to do with the viewpoints of the organising comitee.

9 Replies to “no deiss – i don’t give a deiss2 min read

  1. My dear Jan

    I just wanted to tell you that you (and your fugly but very smart twin brother) are the best and that no-one else could have organised and coordinated this event better.

    Whenever there’s something to win, there’s always one or the other offended diva – it’s the rule of life. I’m sure that sooner or later the tempers will calm down and the case put to rest. It really seems that most bloggers from the Romandie who criticise the outcome of the nominations, didn’t really understand the nomination process.

    If you really want to make sure not to get any criticism next time, you’d have to set up a sub-nomination group for every language group in Switzerland, maybe even every canton. Also, people who go shopping at Coop should be listed seperately from people who go shopping at Migros. But that’d be silly, wouldn’t it? The thing is, setting up sub-categories can often even be less representative – about all, if it’s about such a global thing as blogs.

    I believe this is a very silly “Machtkampf” that’s going on now. Please, please, don’t let yourself be discouraged by all this.

    You rule. And that’s all that counts. My armadillo and I just wanted to make sure that you don’t ever forget this.

  2. my dear suzanne …

    thx love. but i admit it, am VERY frustrated with results, because my personal number #2 was not nominated, wurzeltod.ch. nor was my no 1. pasta & vinegar.
    i think aramdrillo owners should win a price no questions asked. d’office.

    when when when can we meet againnnn???

  3. Awww… well that was too kind of you. However, Mr Armadillo and I aim for greater challenges. I set up a blog for him where he talks about his daily affairs with Swiss politicians and posts nudie pictures. À la Washingtonienne, you see. We bribed everyone in Hollywood and we shall win the Webby® Awards this year.

    Well, I invited you to Fumetto and you didn’t come… *sobs*… so I assumed you didn’t want to meet again. Look, I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise, but I’m going out with your fugly twin brother now. He’s soooooooo romantic. *sighs*

  4. @ suzanne1: sooo fiiiss. why does he [= my fugly twin brother] get all the girls? grml hmpf.
    @ heather: scissors, stone or rock? – – – rock!
    @ matt: to an end?
    @ suzanne2: nobody makes up fake studies like you do, hunnn

  5. “one guy went as far as writing an open letter to our sponsors asking them to retire their support”

    hi Jan, let me just ask you a question: where did you read in my letter that I request such a thing? i suggest to the sponsors to ask the organisers why romand ou ticinese blogs were excluded from the nominations.

    with that, i do not want that they retire their support to sbaw. i just want that they maintain a certain pressure on the organisers in order to ensure that next year such things will not occur.

    furthermore, i have to precise that i am not in favour of a sbaw boycott which completely unproductive. even in my personal case i cannot come to this event, i hope that several romands or ticinese participate to the sbaw event.

    cheers, db.

  6. @ dominique: you are absolutely right. sorry about that. at first i actually thought that you had not asked for that, but when i read elsewhere, that you did ask for that, the exact formulation being “request made to sponsors to withdraw their support;”, i assumed i must have overread that passage and adopted the info without doublechecking. i edited this in my posting.

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