1:30pm – Updated with revised judging panel.
When I think of a reality show, I think of people competing for prizes, being judged and getting voted out of the house, off the stage or off of the island.  Take that concept and apply it directly to tech bloggers and what would it be? It would be a very cool contest that I’m going to be taking part it starting the first week in August.
Thomas Jones of NikeTown588.com is hosting a blogger reality show for up and coming tech bloggers. I was lucky enough to meet Thomas during my recent trip to HP Discover and I was really excited when he announced the Blogger Reality Show contest. I was even more stoked when I got the email that said I had made it INTO the contest.
Thomas has put together a great program which will pit blogger against blogger, duking it out in a war of words – either written or video. The contestants will attend three online classes, then formulate our blog entries about each class, one a week for three weeks.
The cool part is that you, our readers, will be assisting in the judging process. Each week, my fellow bloggers and I will create our entries based on the class we attend and then you get to comment and vote for our posts. Each of the blogger’s sites will have voting somehow built into the posts. In addition to your comments and votes, re-tweets of our information on Twitter will also count towards the scores. Readers, you hold a lot of power in this competition!
In addition to our readers, my fellow bloggers and I will have a slate of more established bloggers judging our work to make up a second portion of our scores each week. John Obeto (@JohnObeto), Stu Miniman (@Stu), Kristi McDonald (@KRISLMC), Matt Davis (@Da5is), and S. Copeland (@TeckieGirl) will serve as our judging panel for the competition. Each of our judges are well established bloggers with a significant following online. They are obviously knowledgeable about social media, blogging and how to do it right.
Since we have judging and scoring going on, that also means, like American Idol, someone is going home each week. Two bloggers, actually, with the lowest scores and will be leaving the contest each week. When I read that, it was the first time I got nervous about the contest. No one wants to fail, but such is life, we can’t all be winners. Or can we?
The overall winner of the contest will be announced during VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas the last week of August. Each of us has been awarded with the trip to Las Vegas for the announcement, as well as, attendance to the VMworld event, you could say we have all won already.  The contest is graciously being sponsored by HP and Ivy Worldwide. There are several other prizes that will be awarded to players, in addition to the overall winner.
It is always good to know your opponent, but in this case, its my first time ‘meeting’ most of these other bloggers. After reviewing their sites, it is clear that I’ve got some very good competition. Some of the bloggers are more established and have a significant advantage in readership and experience. I encourage you to check them out, also, and make sure you read their blogs during the competition. And now for my competition, the bloggers are…
- Matthew Norwood (@matthewnorwood) (http://www.insearchoftech.
com/ ) - Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) (http://technodrone.blogspot.
com/ ) - Michael Letschin (@mletschin) (http://thesolutionsarchitect.
com/ ) - Luigi Danakos (@nerdblurt) (www.nerdblurt.com)
- Matthew Brender (@mjbrender). (http://itechthereforeiam.com/
) - David Hurst (@the_super_dave) (http://thesuperdave.com/)
As a side note about the sponsors, HP and Ivy Worldwide brought a significant number of bloggers to the HP Discover event to cover it. It is extremely good to see a corporate sponsor realizing the value of tech bloggers and the role we can play in disseminating news, perspectives, solutions and our own experiences with their products. I certainly wanted to send along my thanks to them for underwriting the competition and to Thomas Jones for envisioning and coordinating the opportunity that they have collectively presented to all of the bloggers involved. I cannot wait to begin! Let the competition begin! So, readers, help me stay in the competition and not get evicted, fired, or voted off the island.
