I procured (with great difficulty, no doubt) Kenneth Quinnell to tell us what the Florida Democratic Party Netroots Awards was all about. Quinnell is the creator of the Netroots awards in the state of Florida and is also the recording secretary for the Florida Democratic Party Netroots Coalition.
LD: What is the Netroots Awards and who can be nominated?
Quinnell: The Netroots awards are our recognition of the best and the brightest in the online political world on the left in Florida. So it's for, you know, Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever... But the idea is there are a lot of people out there doing a lot of hard work and doing a lot of important stuff and this is a way to recognize and reward people for that.
LD: How many nominations are there this year?
Quinnell: There are about 150 nominations, of about a 100 of those are unique different people or blogs. Some people are nominated for more than one.
LD: This is the 3rd annual Netroots awards for Florida. What are some changes you have noticed over the years?
Quinnell: Well... The first changes are the technical ones, each year we discover that there are new things that we should be awarding, like we created a new category for Twitter this year because so many people are using Twitter and it's actually been useful or a couple of news stories that were broken first on Twitter by Florida Bloggers. So we'd added a new category for that and for use of social media, etc.
Second is it keeps growing. Each year there's more and more participants. The biggest change though is that there is such an ebb-and-flow in the blogosphere. So there is a recent statistic I saw, something like ninety-five percent of blogs that exist haven't been updated in 2009, so there are always lots of people that start blogging and are really into it and then drop off by the way-side. We get people to come out that do some really great work and then move on to something else. And then there are the people that have been there forever who keep doing it. There's always new people involved and so... Finding them and bringing them in so that everybody gets to read them, that type of thing, is difficult but fun.
LD: How many participants were involved last year?
Quinnell: In the final voting about 230.
LD: How many votes have been submitted since the opening at midnight, last night?
Quinnell: It is 110.
LD: Do you think that sudden input predicts more feedback then last year?
Quinnell: Definitely. I think you are going to see a huge explosion over previous years and participation, particularly because we've got a better plan this year to market it and get the word out to more people, so... Obviously we're gonna pass the 230 people from last year, probably within the next couple of days. But we're also going to have many of the nominees send it out to their supporters so that more and more people will know about it. It's a way both to market the organization, the awards, and the different blogs and people that have been nominated. I think we're going to see much, much higher participation this year.
LD: Who can vote for the Netroots awards?
Quinnell: It's pretty much open to anyone. The idea is that it's Florida Democrats and progressives but we're not screening to keep out anyone else.
LD: To anyone who is interested in voting, how would they go about that?
Quinnell: They would just go to the website, which has a very complicated URL, so uhm.. I can go to the tinyurl and tell you that one: tinyurl.com/po7vck
LD: When is the voting deadline?
Quinnell: September 29th. There is a possibility of run-off if the races after the initial period are still really close together, we will do a re-vote, so that you know, because many of the categories have six, seven, eight, nine, ten people in it. If some of them are really close, within say five or six votes, then we'll narrow it down to the top three or four and then do a re-vote so that we're really picking out which one is the one that people like the most, and that would be the week after that. They will be announced October 7th or 8th, at the Democratic convention, I don't know the date exactly off the top of my head.
LD: What inspired you to start the Netroots Awards?
Quinnell: Oddly enough, this is something I have done in every organization I have been involved with over the years. I've always been a big person on giving people positive feedback. There's always people that don't like it but, more people than not, do. It's something that...you know, you sit there, and do all this research and spend all this time writing this really great blog post and you post it and then ...nothing. There's no comments and no feedback and nobody links to it.
Well, If you do enough of that type of good stuff over time, you can get nominated for one of the awards and get feedback saying that your overall body of work is good even if individual posts don't get as much recognition as they should. I think it's a very good way to motivate people to keep posting, to keep using Twitter, to keep using Facebook, and all this stuff because these things do have an impact on what happens. These people that are out there doing all this work are getting recognized and rewarded so they will keep doing that work and they will keep changing the world.
LD: And how will the winning nominees be recognized?
Quinnell: The most physical way is that there will be a certificate, we always do this little shmancy-fancy certificate suitable for framing. The awards will be announced at the Democratic convention in October and this year we're trying to get the winners announced during a big session. But the Netroots have their own events that go on for an entire day, training and stuff like that. During that process we will announce who the winners are, give them their certificates if they're present, announce it on the blogs.
The real reward of course is you've been recognized by your peers and people that read what you're doing, so its fans and peers and professionals in the field that generally are the ones that participate, so you're getting recognition from them. For many blogs, once you're just nominated, more people get to find out about it so it helps drive more readers and traffic to their blogs.
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