The BritMums Blog

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!

Have you had your say? Take part in our parent blogger benchmark study

We've been watching the British mum blogging phenom from the get go; the community has grown from just a handful of bloggers to nearly 2,000! But what really makes up and drives this eclectic group of highly opinionated bloggers? We want to know!

Are you a British parent blogger? Please fill out this benchmark study; it is anonymous and  will only take a few minutes. Please ask your blogging mates to do the same, the more the merrier. We'll share the results when it's done. Who knows maybe we'll discover that the online middle class mum stereotype is all wrong. Or that you all blog as a type of therapy. Regardless, this is you chance to be heard.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

What's your blog grade?

It's summer, and school is out, but I couldn't resist finding out the score for the BMB Blog.

Social marketing company Hubspot has created The Blog Grader, where you can measure the marketing mojo of your blog. The application will score your blog on criteria such as domain name, Twitter mentions, estimated traffic, number of comments and how often you post.  Like most things on the Internet these days, this service is free.

You can imagine my disappointment when the BMB Blog scored a mere 15 out of 100 (!)  I'm not surprised though, as we haven't even officially launched the blog. But still, ouch, that hurts.

Just for fun, I thought I'd find out how some other blogs stacked up.