The BritMums Blog

Guest post: And the MAD winners are...

Sally Whittle is an editor, blogger and writer who organises the MAD Blog Awards. Here, she introduces the winners for each category and describes an altogether unique awards experience...

This weekend saw the second annual MAD Blog Awards ceremony, which celebrate the very best of British parent blogging.

The MAD Blog Awards isn’t your typical awards ceremony. For starters, the acceptance speeches included references to incontinence, Spanx underwear and an impromptu dance-off between five of the finalists. Of course, no blogging party is complete without some bad karaoke and our finalists proved that their talents don’t necessarily extend to singing, as they lined up to use the X-Factor karaoke pod.  

BritMums blogger nominated for Website of the Year 2011

Some very happy news today, we learned that ReallyKidFriendly.com is in the running to receive the accolade Website of the Year 2011 from the Good Web Guide.

Janis Curry, who runs the site, is also one of our fabulous video bloggers. Check out her recent video blog below on the world's largest zumba class. 

Judges in the Website of the Year competition are looking for as much feedback on the shortlist as possible, so please do support a fellow Brit Mum and visit http://www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/leave-your-feedback/11975 to tell the panel why you think ReallyKidFriendly.com is brilliant! 

 

Announcing The BritMums Awards -- we need you!

You’ve heard of The Brit Awards, right?

This spring, we are excited to announce the first ever BritMums Awards!

The BritMums will celebrate real mums all across the UK. The awards are open to all mums, not just bloggers, and we are depending on you to help crowdsource and develop the programme.

We are in initial discussions with ITN productions to help produce the awards, and we are planning for them to culminate in a gala event that will be lived casted for everyone to enjoy. It will be very cool!

We need your input when it comes to categories and programming. Please let us know which categories you want to see and what types of mums you’d like recognised. We are looking for bloggers to spearhead and evangelise categories, which will include lots of video, so let us know if you are interested in that too.

We want to hear all your ideas, especially for the not-so-obvious categories, like the mum who has the most balls in the air, has prevailed against unusual circumstances, or who has made the biggest difference.

So wrack your brain and let us know which type of mums you’d like to celebrate. We don’t want to miss out dads either.

Please email [email protected] with your category suggestions or leave a comment below.

Looking forward to hearing your creative suggestions.

Blogger of the Week and 10 Must-Tweets

Another week, another brilliant blogger to draw your attention to. This blogger is a London based Magazine Features Writer in her OFFICIAL capacity who combines her talent in writing Children's Product reviews, running a busy household and being an outstanding Mummy to an energetic toddler and delightful new tiddler! She's wondering if there are more hours in the day and I'm wondering how she manages to do it all and still look so fab. This week's Blogger of the Week...Mummy's Little Monkey author Jacqui or @Jax2000 as many of you know her.

The Brilliance in Blogging Awards winners!

It's a cliché at awards ceremonies that at some point someone gets up and says there were so many fantastic entries and stresses how hard it was to choose the winners. That's not going to happen with our awards.

First of all, we're having a virtual ceremony to which everyone is invited, so no one is standing up at all, unless it's to go make themselves a cup of tea while they're tweeting.

Secondly, we ducked the whole issue of choosing and asked you to vote on your favourites.

Thirdly...well, thirdly, there were lots of fantastic entries (more than 400 of them overall) and they demonstrated such a wide range of enthusiasms, interests, voices and topics that in truth it was still difficult as voters to choose the ones that top the lists.

Congratulations to everyone who was nominated, short-listed or won. And thanks to all those folks out there who cast votes (more than 4,000 total!). We've included some of their coments and thoughts about the blogs below. While we're at it, we say hats off to this amazing blogging community that continues to support one another, develop and grow with each passing day.

It's been a brilliant year!

Join the Brilliance in Blogging Awards Tweetup Wednesday

More than 4,ooo votes have been cast for the Brilliance in Blogging Awards (!) and on Wednesday we'll announce the folks who you told us inspired you, made a difference and made you laugh. We'll announce the winners at a 1pm Tweetup (come join the online conversation using the hashtag #brillBMB) then post the list of winners here. Start the year with a celebration of great blogging and come share your own blogging successes at the online Tweetup. Wednesday13:00 #brillBMB See you then!

Do news analysis on your site? Nominate for the Online Media Awards

The Online Media Awards has been established to recognise "the cleverest, boldest and most original news and views" coverage internationally. While the big boys like the BBC and the Guardian vie for title, the awards also want to include individuals next to the corporations.

It has a special category for Best Commentary/Blogging that seeks to highlight "outstanding analysis, insights as well as wit" with a "Micro" (up to 99,000 monthly unique visitors) section. Do you regularly blog about news, current events and parenting developments? Then you should enter.

Think you qualify? Enter now before the 11 Feb 2011 deadline.

Vote now! The Brilliance in Blogging short list!

In just a week we received a deluge of nominations for our inaugural awards. Brilliance in Blogging is designed to highlight and recognise some of the most interesting, innovating and thought-provoking work going on within the British mum blogging community. Now we have a shortlist for you to vote on your favourites!

These finalists demonstrate a wide range of qualities: they might be adopting new technologies, video blogging, taking active part in wider blogging discussions or making their blogs showcases for beautiful design and interesting photographs. They are each doing something a little bit differently, making their blogs a success in their own way. For that, we salute them.

You rock! Brilliance in Blogging Awards 2010

Update: NOMINATIONS ARE NOW CLOSED.

Cast your mind back to January of this year. An earthquake struck in Haiti, a curry lover saw Jesus in his naan and a big freeze causes travel chaos in the UK. It was also the beginning of an amazing year in blogging.

Since then, hundreds have joined the BMB blogging community, bloggers have raised awareness of important charitable causes, taken up video blogging, used their blogs as launch pads for other writing or businesses...in short we’ve seen blogs become more engaging and innovative as well as more fun to read.