UPDATE: Disregard this post as the BABA awards turned out to be a mess! Polls
were rigged and had to be shut down. Thanks for all who took the time
to vote for me!
Monday is the last day of voting for the BABA (Best Arab Blog) awards. Mental Mayhem is nominated in seven categories. If you think this blog is worth a vote, please follow these links and vote:
- Best Jordanian Blog
- Best Photography Blog
- Best Arab Blog (English)
- Best Blog Design
- Best Essayist Blog
- Best Everyday Life Blog
- Best Personal Blog
Remember, you can vote once each day for the next three days. Thanks for your support!
Dear All (and especially “Disqualifications”)
First, I would like to say that I am the one who nominated Mentaly Mayhem for all these categories. I did that although I knew (and it did happen) that Mental Mayhem (being older, more professiona, in English, and having wide readership-reflected in the hitcounters) will beat my blogs in the categories we competed (like best Essayist, best Arab blog, etc…). I never hesitated to nominate this excellent blog and I think it deserves the best English (together with Baghdad Burning, which I also nominated).
I have had a bad experience with competitions before (in a competition called the BOBs) that I won in the last minute after having complained a lot against cheating. I never accused my competitor of cheating (although I raised the issue publicly and was misunderstood). I discussed the issue with Haitham at the beginning of the BABA, and they thought that all the warnings they made were enough.
I followed the competition closely by looking at the number of total votes per category, and I asked my friends who voted to update me for results… I could see that Mental Mayhem and Baghdad Burning had lot of initial success (although they didn’t really advertise). I won’t accuse anybody, but people who compete with a blog with many hundred votes have to do something to win. So maybe, one or two of those have chosen to just keep voting from the same computer ignoring the rules. I have seen one or two blogs having more votes than visitors- and I witness that this does not apply to Natasha. Her blog has hundreds of visitors daily; she writes in English; she writes a lot everyday; she has contacts in the Arab world and the USA. All these factors make a blog successful. I personally get 40-60 visits daily; but one day I posted in English about Bin-Laden and USA elections, and I received 3500 visits in 3 days. SO… webtrafic has its rules. English readers are millions while Arabic readers are thousands. So.. I think “Disqualifications” is really wrong. I am certain though that somebody was cheating so badly.
Never mind.
I join voices with Mahmoud, Haitham, Linda, and others: Natasha: Your blog is a model.