Reality on Bravo

Project Blog is an ongoing competition that coincides with Bravo’s Project Runway. Every week, blogtestants from all over the blog-o-sphere compete in blogging challenges. Every week, the top blogger wins a special prize and, more importantly, immunity and the blogger with the lowest score is eliminated. There are prizes for readers too! And you can play along on your own blog if you’d like email me at allison.boyer-at-yahoo-dot-com with your entries, and I’ll show you a little link love AND give you an additional entry in the prize for that given week!

In this past week’s challenge, blogtestants were asked to give us goals for the new year. Bloggers were judged on how well they inspired us and interested readers.You can find a list of their entries here.

You guys voted to pick the reader’s favorites, who get points, which are added to the judges’ scores to create a final score for each player. Project Blog Judges are Beth (the winner of the Reality on Bravo “Create your own Reality Show” contest), April (a freelance writer and the blogger for Life as a Christian Woman), and myself.

Imagine, if you will, that the bloggers are lined up on a virtual runway, because it’s time to announce the winner! There was some stiff competition this week, but the person with the highest score is….

Blogtestants, your entries were downright awesome. I *might* be inspired to jump on that treadmill come the new year. Might. Kate is back on top this week, though because her entry really captured us, and judging from the reader response, she did that to everyone else as well. For the first week, Winnie had a real challenger for top spot in the readership vote!

Congratulations, Kate. You and your blog, Babylune, win week five of Project Blog!! You have immunity next week and will be getting a cool prize in the mail in the next week or so.

Mark, you captured second place points. You may not have the biggest readership community, but you wooed the judges, getting points from all three of us (a rarity - we never agree!!).

NOTICE TO BLOGGERS: This is the last week immunity will be offered!!

And now for the part I don’t like…the elimination.

Sigh.

You’re all wonderful bloggers, but we do have a few comments for the bottom two before making an elimination. Congratulations Winnie and Jodie. Your scores have qualified you to remain in the competition; you may leave the virtual runway.

That leaves us with the bottom two. Kara and Sally, let’s bring out your models…er…blogs so we can make a few comments.

Both posts fulfilled the requirements quite well - you gave us goals for 2008. We just really missed that “spark” to draw us into your post, in both cases. Perhaps they were a bit too “personal”. Although writing about personal goals (rather than goals about your specific topic) was totally acceptable, we didn’t feel that connection. In other words, what in your posts would interest readers who typically come to your blog for information about your topic? Your posts have to always be relevant for long-term readers. If they are personal (which admittedly makes your blog “you”), we would have liked to see shorter, more concise posts, since not every person will be interested about the blogger’s personal life.

This was by far the toughest decision we’ve had to make. In fact, there was less than ten points difference between the top and bottom blogger!

Now here’s the hard part…this week, we’re eliminating:

It makes me so sad to write that, as everyone on the judging team absolutely loves your creativity in meeting challenges. The deciding factor was formatting - we found Sally’s entry to be more “skim-able”, which is always a good trait for any blog choice!

I’d like to take this moment to say that all of the judges at Project Blog miss ALL past contestants. Here’s a little linky-love, guys! Readers, go check ‘em out to see what’s new with past friends:

Randi, Brad Pitt Wat

Cynthia, TV of the Absurd

Kara, Colorado Review

REMINDER: Project Blog is on a little breaky-break for the holidays, so no new competition tonight!