The only real exception to this was corporate blogging – bt you could see where this one was going when all of the nominees learned of the news from the same source – the eventual winner of the category.

There’s no way to deal with the campaigning – it even infects major awards shows like the Oscars – though you could probably minimize the effect of pack voting by creating a slate of voters (much in the way the academy does). Though this does not minimize that effect – witness last year’s results when the US K-12 bloggers voted en masse for each other.

If you want a splash, keep the nominees secret until you announce them, the way you did this time, and keep the results secret until the ceremony.

I would also consider attempting to merge with other awards in the field. I just finished reading a post about e-learning course awards — http://desire2blog.blogspot.com/2007/12/itc-best-course-awards.html — and lst week I saw something about e-learning technology awards. John Hibbs used to suggest that there should be an Academy of e-learning . The way to do that is to get these various contests to coordinate.

I think this would have quite a number of good effects. It would increase the pool of voters, but it would diversity it as well. People looking at the blogs would be looking at some of them for the first time (since they would be course designers and software writers and the like).

You could have a space for people to write testimonials, to describe the entries (especially in the course and technologies entries), etc. etc.

I think it would be very good for the discipline as a whole to have a set of awards, recognized and promoted by the major players (each of which could sponsor an award or a category). It would prevent award overlaps, and it would vastly overshadow vendor-specific awards.