Note: See bottom of this post for updates.
Last year I wrote about the blogs that were shortlisted for – and won – the Wales Blog Awards. I had an idea for a follow-up post this year that would give a more detailed analysis of the Welsh blogging scene. I would measure things like post frequency, average comments attracted per post, image use, age of blog, social media followers etc.
In addition, I wanted to go back and look at the blogs shortlisted for 2010 and 2011. This is when I noticed that much of the history of the Wales Blog Awards has already been deleted.
I asked for some help on Twitter, and today I received this information from Warwick Emanuel, the PR company who run the awards in conjunction with Media Wales:
From what I remember, this WINNERS.doc does in fact contain the winners of the 2010 Wales Blog Awards, so that’s a start. They also still have the 2011 winners listed on their site, but that is now the very first post that exists on that site. The 2011 shortlist and everything from 2010 is now Internet ancient history. (The best record of the 2011 nominees appears to be my post!)
Do you have any of this information?
I would like to collect all of the winners and shortlists (and even the long-lists) from 2010 and 2011 simply to display them on a page of this blog for posterity.
I haven’t started any detective work myself yet, but I’m hopeful that some information can be recovered. If you have anything that can help me, please leave a comment or send me a tweet. I’ll update this post with what I find, and then compile the data on another page.
Updates
- I’ve had another email from WEPR with the long-list, shortlist and winners from 2011. I’ll get this info online ASAP.
- I’ve added a work-in-progress page to this blog to serve as an archive: Wales Blog Awards. More still to come. So far, I can’t seem to find who writes Ffwtbol – any ideas?
halfblog.net 
Maybe you’ve got the answer by now, but Ffwtbol is written by Phil Stead (says so on the About page!) @pjstead on Twitter.
The Welsh Blog Awards webiste/blog is not great – they do’n t reply to comments and only put hyperlinks to blogs after some pestering. I’m not really into awards myself, but anything that gives exposure to blogs can only be good.
I’ve only now just read the post regarding choice of platform for the 2011 winners. It would be interesting to see if there are any trends.
I may have already mentioned this in a previous comment here, but Carl Morris and I (and others) have been compiling a list of Welsh language blogs, past and present, and categorising them by subject, location, publishing platform, gender, year established, blogger’s location etc. We haven’t studied the data properly yet, but it looks like Blogger was by far the most popular 5-10 years ago, while now wordpress.com is probably the more popular.
That Ffwtbol about page has been updated since I wrote this (to promote his book). I remember it being more ambiguous and mentioning a handover of ownership, so at the time I wasn’t sure who ran it. Thanks though.
I’ll add Phil’s name to my list.