Survivor-Blog Wars

I’ve got this germ of an idea, but don’t know how to go about getting it off the ground. It’s based on the reality series, Survivor, only this is “Survivor: Blog Wars”. It works something like this. A group of one hundred bloggers have a contest in which, every week or month, we all vote for our favorite blog posts, with the understanding we have to vote for somebody else’s blog post, not our own.

Voting ends by a specified date, at which point the blog or blog post with no votes at all, or the least amount of votes, is “blogged off”. The only problem with this scenario is, the more blogs there are the more likely this is to result in massive blog off, at least initially. The original one hundred blogs might well be whittled down to ten or less pretty quickly, which will thus discourage further participation.

Here’s the best way possible to do this. If this is sounding like I just made this up while in the process of typing this post, you would be right, by the way, but here it goes.

What if I started a separate specific blog with a link to participating bloggers on it’s own blogroll, and each week presented a post made up of links to the participating bloggers posts which they themselves contribute to the contest, along with a brief summary of the post.

Not only they, but anybody reading the blog, would then be eligible to vote for the best blog of the month. Voting would be on going over the course of that month, and the winning post announced at the end of the week immediately preceding the next round.

Each blog removed from the main blogroll would remain linked on the site, but on a separate “blogroll of losers”, though I might and probably will call it something less demeaning.

What I am thinking of doing is having the comments page moderated as a means of controlling spam if not eliminating it, but on the other hand, I want to encourage public discussion of posts as well. So, what I could also do is set up a vote by polling procedure where the poll is listed on the sidebar, or at the end of each monthly post. Yep, I just made that up off the top of my head again. Ain’t brainstorming fun?

If anybody is interested in participating, let me know by way of this post. If I don’t get at least twenty interested participants, I’ll probably just forget the whole thing. I just have to figure out a way to facilitate my receiving the posts folks want linked for consideration, as well as their homepage urls for the blogrolls, and we’re good to go.

As a rule, there will be no limitations or qualifications as to the kinds of blogs represented or the types of posts submitted for consideration. I think you’ve all got enough sense to know that if you’re doing a mommy blog or a what I had for breakfast today type of thing, most people aren’t going to be too interested, so I’ll trust you to not want to embarrass yourselves. Of course, if I suddenly find the site overwhelmed by robot submissions to spam sites I’ll definitely put my foot down and, if I ever find you, up your ass.

As for what you win if you win, that depends on how actively participants as a group promote the site. The overriding goal should be to attract more visitors to your own site. Of course this is going on the assumption that the reason you blog is at least in part to reach an audience for your writing. Look at it from this perspective-if we succeed in gaining a respectably large amount of readers, then we all “win”.

Anyway, let me know, and I’ll try to see what I can do with what limited time I can spare. Actually, I am hoping my major contribution time wise will be however long it takes to set the site up and get it running, though it will also take some time to copy and paste the various urls at the beginning of each month and reset the sidebar poll, each of which will just be one monthly chore. If it works it will be worth it, but the only drawback is, if it is successful, I might have to set firm limits on the number of participants unless I can find somebody I can take as a partner whom I know I can depend on to take up the slack. But, we’ll worry about that eventuality when and if the time comes.

As for the categories-

Politics
Religion
Occult and Supernatural
Popular Culture and Entertainment
Education
Science and Technology
Law
True Crime
Sports
Adult Relationships
History
Travel
Food
News-Local, Regional, State, National, World
Human Interest
Animals
Environment
Energy
Mythology
Humor
Pornography (non-spam)
Photography
Fiction
Fine Arts
Leisure
Activism
Music
Drama
Television
Movies
Art
Hedonism
Philosophy

Feel free to infer that this is not necessarily a complete list, and don’t feel left out if you aren’t included. Like I said, I’ll take anything but something that is obvious spam.

Of course, it goes without saying that this is going to be one contest, not a series of different contests pertaining to separate specific categories. You might feel dismayed to see your thoughtful, well-written post on the power of prayer outvoted in favor of a post about the latest antics of Paris Hilton. In the event this occurs, don’t take it hard-just try harder and understand that, the more readers the site attracts, the more potential readers you might draw who might well be interested in what you have to say.

One other thing-if you want to submit a link to a post that is dependent on YouTube, that’s fine, but I am only including the link to the post on your site. I will not include the actual YouTube link, and the same rule applies to other secondary links.

Also, it would be a practical impossibility to seek to impose limits on the number of votes each person can cast. I could conceivably do it, using some kind of system such as SiteMeter or Statcounter, but it would be far too time consuming. No system is perfect, and I doubt this will be a serious problem anyway, unless spambots become involved, and if they do I could probably detect that from the nature of the sites receiving the votes-which I would have probably already excluded anyway.

Finally, the winner of each year-yes, I just now decided that this will be a year long contest-will be crowned as a winner in a third separate blogroll, to be joined by future winners. The preceding year’s main blogroll of currently participating contestants would then be cleared for the next group of participants. All of the non-winners of each year would then take their place on the loser’s blogroll-which, if this idea works, will become pretty damned extensive over time. Of course, contestants from past years would also be eligible for the next year’s contest-including any winner from previous years.

If this is all confusing, remember I made all of this up as I typed. Anyway, I’m looking forward to your input. This could, if it gets adequate interest, participation, and promotion, be a good way to attract readership to blogs that might otherwise have a hard time attracting readers due to the constant barrage of bullshit that chokes out worthwhile sites like weeds in a flower garden.