Web 2.0 Blogging Competition at www.profy.com

During the past 2 weeks we have seen a friendly community of people with a passion for Web 2.0 and the latest Internet trends begin to gather here. I thank all of our authors for their contributions – both their posts and their valuable suggestions and feedback. 

Today I am pleased to announce two new competitions and the availability of enhanced profiles for our authors.

First, the competitions. We at Profy wish to encourage discussion and information exchange and we always welcome breaking news and in-depth analysis. Moreover, we believe that in addition to the standard remuneration and credit our authors receive per article further compensation and recognition are merited for the articles attracting the widest readership. Therefore, starting this week, we are launching two competitions – the Post of the Week and the Author of the Week.

On 13 November 2006, and every week after that we will award a prize of $50 to the author of the article that in the preceding 2 weeks drew the most unique readers in its first 7 days of publication. Thus, eligible articles posted this week will compete for the prize awarded on 13 November, eligible articles posted next week will compete for the prize awarded on 20 November, and so on. In addition to the Post of the Week, we will name the Author of the Week, awarding a $75 prize to the blogger with the highest total of unique visitors to all eligible entries in the competition. Moreover, we will offer a special bonus to anyone who manages to win Author of the Week three times in a row.

The main objective of our competitions is to encourage you to write posts that are interesting, high-quality and insightful and which bring new members to our community. We are firm believers of user-created content and we really think that together we will be able to make this website one of the most reliable and interesting sources of information for internet enthusiasts around the globe.

You can see that the special competition statistics page is already set up. There, for every newly posted article meeting the competition eligibility requirements, you will be able to track – in real time – the number of unique readers of an article during its first 7 days of publication. Statistics for Blogger of the Week will also appear on the statistics page. Only articles eligible for the Post of the Week competition will be considered in naming the Author of the Week.

So, what is an eligible entry? Here are our simple requirements. For a post to be tracked on the competition statistics page:
- the article should be more than 250 words – that’s for search engines indexing reasons and because we believe that a shorter post will not give you the chance to discuss your subject properly and in enough depth to be interesting to readers and entice them to stay;
- the article should contain your own opinions instead of lengthy quotations with only short introductions and conclusions from you.
Any post meeting the above requirements will automatically be entered into the competition. Multiple posts from the same author are allowed.

These competitions are merely an experiment, the first step of a long series, so I invite everyone’s suggestions about how we can improve the process of selecting the Post of the Week and the Author of the Week.

Now, if you have not joined our team of authors yet but wish to, I invite you to contact me directly with your ideas on what you could write about for our blog. Once you start writing your posts, you are in the game!

And this leads me to our other innovation this week. We have added to the website a new profile format for our authors. Authors can now show whatever contact and professional information they wish. The profiles also make it possible to view an author’s posts at www.profy.com, the categories he or she writes about most and his or her other blogs. I hope this new format will be useful both for our authors, who should benefit from better publicity, and for their interested readers, who might want to know the authors better. I invite your further suggestions on the profile content.

All of us at www.profy.com hope that these features will make your stay here more exciting and rewarding.  Again, welcome!