Pakistan Blog Awards, the Concerns and the Future!

If you are a blogger then there are chances that you are aware of recently held 2nd Pakistan blog awards, its results and controversies surrounding it.

We have appreciated these awards in the past (when they were first held last year), and understand that they were meant to promote the community, help build better understanding amongst the bloggers and to reward those who outclass others.

However, none of this was achieved. In fact community seems divided with plenty of rift between elite bloggers (those FnF with organizers) and new/small/establishing bloggers.

Blog awards, on another front, were largely criticized for flawed judging criteria.

Instead of re-writing the whole saga, I would link few blog entries that have discussed Pakistan blog awards already:

• Pakistan Blog Awards – Unfair? (Awab Alvi and Faisal Kapadia)
• Open Letter to CIO / PC World (Pak Tea House)
• Blog Awards – My win list (Faisal kapadia)
• A question about Pak blog Awards part 2 (Faisal kapadia)
• Real Winner of Pakistan Blog Awards (Jewairia Q)
• A critical comment on Pakistan Blog Awards 2011 (Mureed Bizenjo)
• Pakistan Blog Awards: From A Blogger’s View (Kinza Tahir)
• 2nd Annual Pakistan Blog Awards (Farhan Janjua)

For those who don’t want to run through all these posts, let me list few things that community is concerned about:

• Judging criteria was flawed, as there are blogs amongst the winners having less than 10 posts/entries.
• Many believe that awards were influenced by sponsors, for instance http://zaviews.blogspot.com/ won best blog award in “Current Affairs” category, which according to many was a biased decision.
• Imran Khan was invited as chief guest, though his participation was not announced before head and hence many think that organizers politicized the event.
• Many believe that Blog awards are hijacked by group of few elite bloggers (FnF of organizers) who uselessly get mentioned during the events, while small/establishing bloggers are usually pushed to the corners.
• Judges were not announced before the event – and bloggers are so valid to question the organizers about this.

To know organizers’ view point, I called CIO Pakistan, and spoke with a lady which was reportedly part of organizing team. She asked me to email her the queries, which I did but never got back the response even after 48 hours.

This is not the first time blog awards are being criticized, even last time, 4 winner awards in one same category were announced, meaning that there were four winners for one category. [Only in Pakistan].

At this point of time, we aren’t certain about Blog Awards’ future. We saw many bloggers not participating in second blog awards due to controversial results of first blog awards. Given the situation has reached this level in just two annual awards, we aren’t sure if third blog awards will be held or not.