Canceled!

Yes the 2009 Weblog Awards have been canceled.  This is the announement from their website:

It is with a great deal of regret that I must inform everyone that The 2009 Weblog Awards are canceled.

Unfortunately the resources required to handle the load of voting (nearly 1,000,000 votes in 2008) could not be adequately provisioned. Even if the servers and bandwidth required appeared today it would be at least a few weeks before everything could be ready for voting.

This has always been a very, very labor intensive process, and in recent years with our success a very expensive competition to run. It's hard to have unlimited resources provisioned for seven days of voting. In the past we've had to provision expensive servers for several months to prepare for the crush of voting.

We really tried to solve the resource problems with new ideas (such as cloud computing) this year, but ultimately we were not able to make things work to our satisfaction. I'm very proud of the voting platform we built for The Weblog Awards over the years, and the quality voting experience we've been able to deliver. The one thing I will not do is compromise that voting experience.

Rather than run a competition that had a high possibility of technically failing, the more prudent choice seemed to be regroup and consider our alternatives for hosting these awards going forward.

Thank you to those who have supported The Weblog Awards over the years, we appreciate your support, and our sorry we couldn't make things work this year.

Will there be a 2010 Weblog Award?  Who knows.  But I would like to thank all of my readers who nominated Monkey in the Middle (Best Up and Coming Blog {Authority between 51 and 100}).  I do believe this old playground could have won.



Maybe next year.  There is always next year!