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[davethegame]

Originally Posted by Treebore

Pay up Podcasters, its only fair to the others that you have a cost as well.

It might not be quite so diplomatic of me to weigh in here because I have some conflicting issues in the whole matter, but I've got to say this:

Bloggers and podcasters, as a whole, do it because we love it. There are some pockets of professionals who actively make money and have budgets to do advertising and whatnot, but the majority of us spend our time and effort to entertain people for free. We do it because we love games and we love talking about games. Clearly, the Ennies consider them "fan products" and not professional endeavors.

So basically, what is being asked is for people who already spend a lot of time and effort giving away things for free and never recouping the costs to go ahead and spend even more time and money to submit their work on CDs, mainly to gain recognition. Though I'm sure there is a boost in readership and any ad revenue, I would be willing to guess it's not huge.

I was infuriated and then heartbroken to see the "Fan Product" category last year. Podcasts, websites, and a PDF adventure all lumped in together. Not only are those things incomparable, the ones that did make it were in some cases baffling. The honorable mention website hadn't been updated in quite some time, and I know for a fact that there were other entrants who showed a higher standard of quality and were still being regularly updated, but didn't make it past the nomination phase.

(Thankfully, the site that won the award is "one of ours" so that made me feel a bit better )

From what I hear now, it looks like that situation is going to change, which is quite a shame. I know I'm not objective at this at all, but running the new RPG Bloggers Network, there are TONS of quality sites out there, and this next year could be quite big for RPG websites. Yet from Zach's comments, it seems like it'll be a messed up category again, with the same (or worse) problems as last year. We'd love to get recognized for our efforts in something as big as the Ennies, as I'm sure our podcasting brethren would, but if the process is onerous it's not going to make anyone in those spheres happy.

I have the utmost respect for the organizers and judges involved in the process and the time it takes. Awards are a really tough thing to tackle, as you're always going to have complaints about the way things are run, people's assessment of the products that do make it, etc. That's not an easy job any way you slice it. But I think it's important to take a long hard look at how things are being run to make as many of those with stakes in the awards happy as you can, from the judges to the possible entrants. Clearly even those I would consider "insiders" are having some issues, and so it looks like something should be done.

Alright, I'm done