Coffee Hour

Nominations open for UU Blog Awards

Almost a month ago, I announced that we would celebrate the new year here at Coffee Hour by honoring outstanding Unitarian Universalist blogs, journals, and on-line forums. After some fruitful conversation about possible award categories, we have finally set up three tracks of awards and opened up nominations. Hooray!

How can you participate? First, read through the award categories. We'll be giving six awards for general excellence, five for individual entries, and three specialized awards. Then, spend some time browsing through your favorite UU blogs and online communities. Even better, spend at least a little time visiting blogs and communities you don't know well. Where to find them? Why, on the front page of Coffee Hour, down in the sidebar below the Current Poll, where you'll see a list of UU blogs and another list of online forums. A blog or forum does not need to be listed already to be eligible. You may know of extraordinary blogs or journals that I've never heard about; this would be a great time to tell the rest of us about them.

When you find something you think deserves one of the awards, go to the appropriate list of awards and add a comment that gives the name of the blog or forum (and the title of the individual entry, if you're nominating an individual entry), along with the link to the page you're nominating. (Copy the http:// code from your browser window when you're on the page you want to nominate and then paste it into your comment here at Coffee Hour.)

A note about eligibility: It seems to me that any publicly-accessible blog, online diary, journal, on-line forum, news group, or bulletin board related to Unitarian Universalism is fair game for these awards, so long as the blog or blog entry was published on-line in 2004 and is still available for other readers to visit. Members-only sites that require registration in order to read a post (such as "friends-only" LiveJournal diaries) are not eligible.

Finally, don't feel restricted in the number of nominations you can offer. Let's recommend great stuff — and if you want to second or third or fourth a nomination, please do. The real point of these awards is to highlight outstanding work on the Interdependent Web in the last year, so let's highlight away. Also, there's no reason you can't nominate yourself. Go right ahead.

Nominations will wrap up Friday, January 14. Feel free to post questions or comments about the process in this entry.