Storm Sponsors Apple laptop as Top Prize for SA Blog Awards

2007 SA Blog Awards are open for nominations and voting – and this year sees a Macbook Pro as the first “real” prize for the Best Overall category

The 2007 South African Blog Awards has moved from an enthusiasts-only event where the only reward is kudos from other bloggers to a hotly contested competition – and for the first time the winner of “Best Overall Blog” will walk off with a highly desirable prize, a Mac Book Pro worth over R17 000 sponsored by Storm Telecom.

Now in its third year, the SA Weblog Awards showcases the best of South African independent Web publishing, as nominated and voted for by the SA Web community.

“This fantastic first prize lifts the profile of the awards dramatically and adds credibility. In previous awards the prizes were essentially little more than public acknowledgement. Now the SA Blog Awards are becoming a major event in publishing, thanks to the support of companies like Storm,” said Jonathan Cherry, MD of Cherryflave Media, who is hosting the awards.

“Storm Telecom decided to put up a really decent first prize to help turn the SA Blog Awards into a competition that bloggers would definitely want to win. As a major Internet Service Provider in South Africa, we are interested in the development of online communities and technologies that bring people together. Blogging is pretty new in South Africa – it’s an adventure for bloggers and an adventure for us. We want to stimulate the professionalism and quality of blogging in SA by giving bloggers incentives to put effort and value into what they do,” said David Gale, New Business Development Director at Storm Telecom.

Blogs are a mixed bag: they can be a source of information or analysis on niche or obscure topics; they can be a news media that operates outside the constraints of the traditional publishing establishment; they can be a source of amusement and deep satire. They can also be irrelevant personal narratives, random diatribes and barely-literate scrawls. “There’s an awful lot of rubbish, which is the nature of user-generated content, but the good stuff bubbles up to the top,” comments Gale.
“Internationally, blogs generally don’t last more than a few months, many just limp for years in a twilight existence, but some have become major media with millions of page impressions a month. To succeed, bloggers need to be driven by a purpose, to have a passion. Storm put up a great first prize in the “Best Overall” category to reward bloggers that have created something really special,” comments Gale.

The SA Weblog Awards was created to give recognition to people that have dedicated a lot of time to their blogs, and to give them the exposure they need, drawing more readers to their sites, and to blogs in general. Blogging is ‘power to the people’ for those with a passion, whether its broader topics like current events or politics, or personal subjects like fertility or philosophy. “Bloggers are usually not beholden to advertisers, so it’s real raw opinion,” said Cherry.
Companies are becoming more aware of blogs as ways to communicate with their customers, and ways for their customers to communicate with each other, either to provide support, or to slam bad service or products.

“Companies that ignore bloggers could be in for a nasty surprise when they discover themselves being pilloried across many blogs on the Internet. At the same time, they can be a powerful ally in marketing, as they’re often perceived as being more credible than online sales blurbs,” says Storm’s Gale.