The results are in, and despite the generous vote of Bow, James* Bow, Dis:Adventure did not merit even a 2nd place finish in the Canadian blog awards. It’s humbling, but in a way, it needn’t be. (UPDATE: * Thanks to Bow, James Bow for pointing out my mistake. “Psst: It’s Bow, James Bow, Like James Bond, get it?”)

a) This is not, in any way, a life-altering experience. Four guys in Ontario (or wherever) got together to put together a “Canadian blog awards” contest. Good for them, but it’s hardly the Genies. Sorry, bad example. It’s not the Oscars - yet! (UPDATE: upon further reflection, I think that the fact that so many people got so involved in it is probably a sign that the CBA are getting bigger and involving more people…)

b) Upon closer inspection, the winner of this category has a huge following on HealthCentral - an american health website much like about.com, where she is the resident expert on Rheumatoid Arthritis (the sudden-onset kind, not age-related). Given that there is no restriction on voting and where from, we need to consider that her advantage of exposure and time probably made it unattainable. I should have put that video on youtube that I had been making as a campaign video.

c) The runner-up in this category is last year’s winner and also won “best blog citizen” last year. He appears to have a slavish following and is a minor publishing and internet celebrity. I have some objections to his blog but I appreciate what he does for people with disabilities. Even being in the same category as him would have made a win for me extremely unlikely.

So - as with all of life, you win in the end if you learn from the experience. So what did I learn?
- Go big or go home
- don’t get overly confident if you don’t know what the $%&# you are talking about (this is something I have a genetic tendency towards.)
- early on, size up the process. This makes the previous point less obvious - if you have a sense of how unlikely it is (read, slightly unfair) that you will ever win, then I won’t waste time on it.
- Use all your media available to you - you never know how much you’ll later need the ability to reach the friends of all of your friends.
- Never neglect your social media sites. I had a video all ready on YouTube which would have helped to reach more of my “Ask A Wheelchair Girl” Audience.
- my blog readership has suffered for the long periods of no writing… and I’ve lost my “niche” because I no longer blog so often on spiritual issues (as with the former SleeplessinSurrey).
- the fact that only five four disability blogs were nominated may say more than anything that there may not be a niche for it yet, or that Canadians with disabilities just don’t self-identify (or that the Canadian Blog Awards themselves are pretty “niche” and thus don’t attract the mainstream of disability blogging)
- that high school elections never truly die - there will always be other competitions in one’s life which are slightly unfair and not worth worrying about.
- a national competition (no matter how “grassroots”) is not the first step on the way to making your blog presence known and respected, perhaps it is more like 12 or 13th step.
- I have supportive friends who nominated me, and for that I am flattered and grateful!!

A few final thoughts for the organizers:
- good for you guys! that was a big (and often thankless) job for which you didn’t get paid. Thanks for jumping in there and trying to make it happen!
- Try using a better polling system next year, or making more of the voting system more transparent before the voting begins next year. This one allowed multiple votes, including those from outside Canada, and didn’t prevent someone making multiple votes from an IP proxy (I know this - I tried it and it worked!)
- along with the previous point - it would be great if you could come up with a better way to establish voting regulations (sort of a Terms & Conditions for the CDNBA) which would keep us all aware if something happened that necessitated changing the rules (as happened with the disability category in removing one of the nominees and having only one round of voting.)
- I found that whole nomination round plus two rounds of voting thing to be a bit strange. Surely there is a faster way to get this done? Was this to allow all of you time to check out the blogs?
- I would appreciate better vetting of nominated blogs - ie no commercial blogs in regular categories (that didn’t happen in mine, but it did in others), only Canadian born or blogs written by those living in Canada.
- In the interests of continually promoting Canadian blogs, it would be a good idea to make winners non-consecutive - that is, you can not run in the same category two years in a row - this makes it possible for some of the quality blogs to be seen and recognized as well, while ensuring that the recognized winners would be challenged to diversify or come back in a different category in order to be further recognized.
- Well done, CDNBA guys!