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Special thanks to all of the volunteers that help with The Weblog Awards! We couldn't put on an event of this magnitude without their help. 

Thank you as well to everyone who followed us on Twitter, sent e-mails, nominated sites, and participated in voting. 

Winners should send an e-mail to winners at weblogawards dot org to receive their customized winners logo. Please indicate the category you won and the name of your site.

First, we'd like to apologize for performance problems today.  We really thought that the first day spike was going to be the biggest traffic day (one that we for the most part successfully navigated) and that traffic to the site would slowly decrease as the week of voting went on.  Up until Sunday traffic followed our expectations, but Monday and Tuesday caught us a bit by surprise, with traffic rising to the first day level again.

Next year we are moving to a cloud computing environment which will allow us to add load balancing, better content caching, and an (nearly) unlimited number of web servers to handle traffic.

On to more current matters.  For the next 24 hours we will be finishing our assessments of all of the vote logs in all of the categories.  To date there have been no votes subtracted, but that may well change before winners are certified.  In the event vote totals are corrected for identified cheating we will leave a note on the poll page where the change is made.   The certified list of winners will be published here on Thursday morning.  The winners list will include instructions for winners on how to collect their winners badges.

Thank you again to everyone who participated, and especially to my team (listed in the credits) for helping to pull this off yet again.

And to those just now visiting for the first time, please go explore the nearly 500 finalist blogs in the 48 categories!

In other important news, we have shut down the poll embed code for all polls and are now redirecting it to a link to the poll page.  We are doing this because today the load on our servers spiked to a degree that sites without embedded polls were having trouble sending voters to the polls.  This would give sites with embedded polls an advantage

As much as we'd like to keep the embedded polls open, the only fair thing to do is close them and make access to the poll page equal for everyone.  Our severs have kept up with the load all week, and the first two days of poll embedding when well.  It was only today, when several sites failed to follow directions, that things noticeably slowed.  With the change made expect load times to improve.

Next year we will move to a cloud computing platform to allow for additional scaling during our voting period.  That's been on our roadmap for the last year, but to date we haven't been comfortable enough with the persistence and performance of the database to make the leap.  In the standard server hosting model we have to provision our servers in advance which makes it difficult to adjust to changes in load once voting starts.  If you're a provider of cloud computing and would like to get involved in hosting The 2009 Weblog Awards contact us at awards at weblogawards dot org.

In other important news, results should be certified by Wednesday night.  Winners will be officially announced on Thursday morning.  At this point nothing we've seen indicates that there will be any changes to the current vote totals, but of course that is always subject to change as events warrant.

First, embed code for all polls will be available by the end of the day (they're listed on the poll pages), along with brief instructions on deploying.  You don't have to be a finalist to host a poll, but you do need to follow the same rules outlined earlier.

Second, for sites that are trailing in their poll now is the time to make up ground.  Slow and steady daily vote totals can overcome many sites that have one day vote spikes.

Third, so far 620,000 votes have been cast since Monday evening.  There have been 1.2 million visitors and 2 million page views. 

Finally, enjoy the weekend and keep voting.

As of Thursday evening we've had 950,000 visitors since The 2008 Weblog Awards began on Monday, of which 250,000 came today.  On the voting front, as of Thursday evening over 375,000 votes have been cast.  We're just about at the halfway point in voting so there's still plenty of time for sites that are down in the polls.

Readers can help by notifying finalist bloggers who have not asked their audience for votes, since we've found that often occurs because the blog owner is unaware they are a finalist.  We've got finalist badges and polls they can embed on their site if they want to participate.  In case you forgot, or hadn't noticed, details on embedding polls for The 2008 Weblog Awards on your site are available here.

Lastly, thank you to those who have take the time to e-mail of tweet to us about how much they appreciate our work on The 2008 Weblog Awards.  We keep doing this year after year because of the little compliments and the enjoyment others get out of The Weblog Awards.

Now go forth and explore the finalist sites!

Udpate:  If I can ask a favor...  Please stop e-mailing me telling "site X is in the wrong category" or questioning our placement of finalists.  I've heard your various concerns and we'll take them into consideration for The 2009 Weblog Awards.  It's too late to make changes to this year's finalists slates.

Details on embedding polls for The 2008 Weblog Awards on your site are available here.

We're posting interesting stuff we find on our Twitter feed throughout the day.  Kudos to judge Matt D. who is manning the reporting duties.  Sign up to follow us, and post your own info into the Twitter sidebar via direct message.

We smashed our previous records for votes and traffic yesterday.  Over 300,000 visitors and 165,000 votes cast.  If the site is slow or non-loading during the day just come back a little later.  From about noon to 6 P.M. (US Eastern) thing were occasionally sluggish.  Outside of those times everything was (and should continue to be) fine.  Based on our experience we expect that over the next few days site performance during those prime-time hours will stabilize and improve.

As expected traffic really exploded and our servers have struggled to keep pace.  This will improve this evening and should be stable later tonight.

As we start to roll out the code for poll embedding that may help with traffic, since a smaller amount of data is sent from our system.

We'll keep you posted...

Every year review the vote logs and voting patterns from previous years to fortify our defenses against manual and automated poll spamming.  This year we've made changes to protect against a handful of savvy folks who take it upon themselves to try and ruin the fun for everyone else.

This year we've implemented additional defenses against poll spamming.  We can't go into all the changes, but we do want to alert you to one change that may affect a subset of users.

If there are multiple computers voting in a home, work, or corporate environment those voters should avoid voting at the same time or one right after another.  If you're not trying to cast votes in these situations simultaneously (or near simultaneously) then there shouldn't be any problem with them being counted.

Due to the sensitivity of this issue we can't really answer every question about our security measures, but know that we have multiple layers of security that are always balanced with providing open voting access to everyone.  The result is a secure, enjoyable experience.

Again, the vast majority of voters will never notice, nor be affected, by these changes, nor will the system ever drop a vote that they cast.  We just wanted to make sure everyone participating knows what's happening.

Polls will open on Jan. 5, but we don't have the exact time they'll open yet determined.  I know this may be an inconvenience to some, but we have to make sure everything is working before we get started.  All the polls are built, we're just running through our final tests to ensure the voting process is smooth.  If the polls don't open until the evening of the 5th we'll extend voting until Jan. 13 to give a full 7 days (and change) for voting.  We're shooting for an afternoon or morning kickoff for voting.

If you are a finalist and you haven't got you finalist badge, go here to get them.  We recommend changing the link to your poll page.

Embeddable polls (where you show the voting screen on your site) will roll out Tuesday or Wednesday.  We delay this to give traffic a chance to stabilize and so that we can phase the implementation of this feature.  Details on how to get the code and how to embed the poll on your page will be sent to the Weblog Awards New mailing list and published on each individual poll page.

To make sure our site is available for the crush tomorrow we have completely disabled comments to cut down server load they generate.  You can use Twitter, the forums, or e-mail is you need to reach us.

We'll see everyone tomorrow!

Finalist badges are now available here. 

To go with the logos, we've now published to poll locations for all categories here.

Finalist are encouraged to modify the link code provide on the logo page to link to their poll page instead of the main page.

Have a great weekend.  We'll have a couple more daily notes this weekend we hope everyone will read.

Don't forget voting begins Monday.

Today we're announcing that the permanent location of each of the 48 polls have been set.  The finalist polls can be reached via the main poll navigation page here.

All comments will be disabled later today.  Discussion is allowed on The Weblog Awards Forum.

Finalist badges will be available very soon - hopefully this evening.  We'll send that information to our e-mail list and update this post.

Update:  We were made aware of a finalist blog in the Best Sports Blog category that appears to be defunct.  Hugging Harold Reynolds was added from the standby list to the finalists slate.  No more changes are anticipated, nor will removal request be honored as the polls are being built now.  That is a labor intensive manual process that's very hard to reverse or modify.

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<a href="http://2008.weblogawards.org/"><img src="http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/4262/wafinalist2008200x130fj2.png" border="0" alt="The 2008 Weblog Awards"/></a>

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<a href="http://2008.weblogawards.org/"><img src="http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/4097/wafinalist2008200x40um4.png" border="0" alt="The 2008 Weblog Awards"/></a>

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<a href="http://2008.weblogawards.org/"><img src="http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/4888/wa_finalist_2008_150x100.png" border="0" alt="The 2008 Weblog Awards"/></a>

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Terms of use

We've licensed The Weblog Awards logos under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

The following additional terms apply to the Creative Commons license:

Attribution entails a link to The 2008 Weblog Awards site (http://2008.weblogawards.org) or any individual pages within The Weblog Awards site.

Use by commercial enterprises is authorized for the purpose of promoting their participation in The Weblog Awards or The Weblog Awards in general.

The only allowable modification is that you may choose to add the name category(s) directly below graphic in a modified version of the graphic. The font used in The Weblog Awards graphic is "Euphemia." It comes bundled with every copy of Mac OS X, and is also available as a free download in TrueType format for Windows. Any modifications should be consistent with the design of the original image.