In the immortal words of U2, "Hello Hello! Ola!". Welcome to the voting round of the 2005 Food Blog Awards. The judges have finished with their voting and judging, and after these are the final nominees that we were able to shake from the tree.

Let me tell you, this was more difficult than anticipated, for two reasons:

1. There were as many as 4 times the amount of nominees over last year.
2. The quality of Food blogs has improved across the board.

This, mixed in with the holiday season, has left me with a bit of egg on my face, as we had to delay the announcement of nominees by two weeks. For that, I apologize.

Let me quickly explain how the final list was determined. Soon after the nominations were complete, I sent an Excel Spreadsheet to all the judges, with a list of all the nominees for each category. I asked the judges to determine their choice for the top 5 sites in each category, and then send the list back to me.

From there, I compiled their choices into one large list, per category. Due to similar tastes in some categories, and vast differences in others, the lists were as small as 12 sites in one category, to over 20 sites in another. I then returned the lists to them, and had them rank them from most favorite to least favorite. I then averaged out the results, and the five lowest scores in each category made it the the voting round.

This is where you, the reader come in. The Polls will remain open until 12 midnight PST on January 18th. We will then review the database to check for any ballot stuffing, and then announce the winners at some point during the following week. My hope is to announce the winners on January 23rd, but I'm a tad skittish at setting dates at the moment, due to my earlier faux pas.

We will be announcing the winners of the polls on WellFed.net, in order to promote the Well Fed site, as well as to move these awards to a more professional arena.

Thank you so much for your patience, and for your readership. I'm quite sure that the owners and writers of the blogs listed here would say the same thing.

Without Further delay, the voting begins....NOW!

If you'd like to link to the voting page, please use the following URL: http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php?disp=arcdir

Also, please leave a comment on this post if you use a shared internet connection and have problems voting, or if a poll says "Thank you for voting" and you haven't yet voted.

Technorati Tags: Food Blog Awards, Blog Awards