On 2nd May 2015 we held the Kenyan Blog Awards gala night at the Hotel Intercontinental Nairobi where the winners were announced. The night was a culmination of a lot of organization and planning over several months. The event was well attended mostly by the online community, the offline community as well as Members of the press, and was streamed live on the KTN site.
The blog awards process usually starts in January of every year when readers submit their favourite blogs into the awards. Submitted blogs are them filtered into categories and handed over to judges who shortlist 5 blogs per category. Judges look at relevance of content, consistency in posting, language use, writing style and marketing when coming up with the short list.
It is this short list of bloggers that is then released back to the public for voting in the different categories. This year, we had 18 categories and voting ran from 2nd March to 30th April.
This year we had a record 1,800 blogs submitted into the competition, and over 151,000 votes cast. This is a clear indication of growth in the space, considering that in 2014, we had 800 blogs submitted and over 50,000 votes. In 2013, we had 500 submissions and in 2012, we had 300 submissions and 10,000 votes.
Kenya has the third highest number of blogs in Africa. It is estimated that there are currently 16,000 created Kenyan blogs. There are approximately 450Million created blogs worldwide.
For those who may have missed the event or would like to re-live it, here is a video of the same.