After running the Tots100 index of the UK’s top 100 parent blogs for six months now, I’m a broken husk of a woman. I twitch involuntarily at the sight of Excel spreadsheets and a misdirected URL feed can reduce me to heaving sobs.
So when some nice people came along and offered to do clever computer jiggery-pokery to so that no matter how many new blogs sign up, I’ll be able to do the whole thing in a morning – well, I was definitely interested. Then they offered me money as well, so I said yes please.
What this means is that from March, the Tots100 index will be sponsored by a fantastic family holiday company. There will be shiny new blog badges that will automatically display your position in the index, and the whole business will be much faster, and a bit less prone to human error.
A lovely bonus of this sponsorship is that there will be prizes for the bloggers in the index. I’d really like some feedback on this – what do people think would be the fairest way to assign the monthly prize (it’s not a speedboat or anything, but will be something fun, like a voucher or camera, or similar).
My initial thought was to give the prize to the highest new entry each month as a way of welcoming new bloggers – but then this rules out everyone who’s already in the index. Then I thought about the blog that has risen furthest up the index each month – which puts the top 20 blogs at a bit of a disadvantage.
We could award to the blog scoring highest in one particular metric – say, the most linked to blog, or the blog with the most comments? Or we could just award a prize randomly (thanks Dan, for that suggestion) but is that a bit – well – random?
Really interested in your thoughts – do leave a comment!
