Blogging Scholarship Finalists Announced!
I want to personally thank everyone who helped with this new scholarship: fellow bloggers, professors, college faculty members, and certainly all of you who submitted an application or nominated someone else.
We received many great applications over the past week and after making some difficult decisions, we have compiled our list of finalists.
Here they are:
- Shelly Batts
- Matthew Himler
- Kambiz Kamrani
- Benjamin Kimball
- Pranam Kolari
- Lisa Marie
- Matthew Mireles
- Paul Stamatiou
- Jennifer Wong
- Stephen Yellin
FYI – Some of our finalists are group bloggers, in which case we link to a profile page on the website where they make blog posts.
Go here now and cast your vote!
October 31st, 2006 at 6:09 am
[…] In our previous post we linked through to the blogs of the finalist for The Blogging Scholarship. […]
October 31st, 2006 at 7:21 am
[…] The top 10 scholarship finalists were announced on October 30, 2006. On October 31st we will opened up a public vote to determine the first winner. Voting will be closed on November 5th and the winner will be announced on November 6th. […]
October 31st, 2006 at 2:59 pm
So the scholarship will be decided as a result of a popular vote? That doesn’t seem like a particularly fair idea. It’ll basically be whomever has the largest number of regular readers that gets the scholarship. Is that really the best judge of quality and worthiness?
October 31st, 2006 at 3:06 pm
I side with what Mike said, I don’t think it should be 100% popularity contest. There is also something to be said for the bloggers that don’t group blog and built their site and readership from the ground up.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Great kid!!!!
Great Personality!!!!!!!!
October 31st, 2006 at 10:15 pm
I agree with Mike and Paul. After reviewing the content of the blogs and getting a taste of what each blog had to offer, my vote changed from what I initially thought I’d be going with.
Being a well known site seems to be helping so far, but there are hidden gems in the blogosphere that I hadn’t previously been exposed to.
October 31st, 2006 at 10:28 pm
[…] The ten finalists for the Blogging Scholarship have been selected. The names and links to their blogs are here. Readers are invited to go check out their blogs and vote for your favorite. I’ve only looked at a few of them, but they seem quite impressive in both design and content. (Although one is a Daily Kos diary that repeats the same angry, mean-spirited political stuff that everybody else on Kos seems to repeat, so points docked for content there.) […]
October 31st, 2006 at 10:54 pm
[…] October Rik Thomas09:54 pmAdd comment Blogging Scholarship Finalists Announced! – Scholarships Around the US […]
October 31st, 2006 at 11:43 pm
Lisa Marie imbues her work with anger, humor, and warmth. What always strikes me is her ability to balance a keen (and often hilarious)critical eye with compassion. She combines a poet’s sensibility with a storyteller’s knack for enaging an audience,and, in so doing, gives us an experience that only she can.
November 4th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
This is a wonderful idea, and there are a number of highly qualified candidates. I would like to suggest, in the future, one rule change. Voting should be on a 5-3-1 basis (5 for 1st Place, 3 for 2nd, 1 for 3rd) with the provision that no vote would be counted unless all three places were filled out.
The reason for this is to encourage people to at least glance at all the candidates before voting.
This year, for example, one candidate — a highly qualified one, let me insist — is being supported by a number of bloggers I read regularly. This is certainly to be encouraged, and the argument “If she’s good enough for X, she’s good enough for me,” is certainly a legitimate reason for casting a ballot.
However, I wonder how many people who did vote for her — and I would have given her a 2nd Place vote, and even that was close, she could easily have gotten my 1st, so I am not criticizing her — simply surfed over and voted without checking the entire list. (Some of them might not even have been familiar with her own blog and simply voted on the basis of the recommendation.)
The change I suggest would lessen the liklihood of such an occurence in the future.
November 9th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
[…] Looks promising. And their competition has ten finalists which clicking through will give you insight into the truely varied themse that compell this generation of students. […]