And the Best FOSS or Linux Blog Is…

In this competition there’s a winner but no losers.

Although only one site gets to call themselves the “FOSS Force Best FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” winner, in reality everybody in the competition has won.

Today we are announcing the winner from a field of ten great blogs, all of which have already won our elimination round. Before that there were 19 truly great blogs in our competition, nine of which had been chosen by visitors to our site, the other ten being hand-picked by us here at FOSS Force as a way of getting things going. They are all winners just by dint of being in the running.

They’re winners in other ways as well.

Each and every blog in this competition not only received free publicity, they had new eyeballs looking, reading and discovering their blogs as well. According to our records, during the four weeks this competition ran nearly four thousand people clicked on links from our site to blogs in this competition–not an earth shattering number to be sure, but not chopped liver either.

Here at FOSS Force we benefited as well.

In some ways the benefits are very tangible. We can count about 1500 hits from folks who came directly from competing blogs and a couple of thousand Reddit hits that were from threads associated with the contest. Other, perhaps more important, benefits are intangible. It feels good to know that some great writers working on some great blogs may have found some new followers because we wanted to have some fun with our polling software.

It’s also nice to realize that some of the bloggers in the running “got it” and worked to get votes for their site–all in the spirit of nothing but fun and with support for other competing blogs which we found gratifying. Some bloggers were even urging readers to check-out each and every blog in the running before voting. What a great community it is that’s developed around free and open source software, eh?

The blog that won, Alien Pastures, wasn’t even a listed blog in the qualifying round and only became included in our competition because of write-in votes in that round. It went on to win the second round voting with 116 votes and picked-up an impressive 523 votes in our final round–which represents 50% of the total votes cast. For this feat, the site has earned to right to display the little graphic image we hobbled together–or not, it’s obviously up to them.

Second place in our poll, Dedoimedo, practically came out of nowhere for an amazing come from behind showing. Like our winner, this site wasn’t even listed in our qualifying round, and only made a fifth place showing, with 20 votes, in round two. However, in the final round they managed to put together 309 votes or 29% of those cast.

Third place honors goes to Martin’s Blog with 83 votes or 8% of those cast. This blog had been the winner in our first round of voting and took second place in round two.

This was fun. We’re going to do it again next year. When we do, the ten blogs from this years final round will make up the seed list for the first qualifying round of voting. We’ll also make sure that all 19 blogs in this competition are included in our blogroll. In addition, we’ll be contacting all of the finalists and offer them the opportunity to write a guest article for FOSS Force.

Again, we’d like to thank all the blogs that took part and all of the people who voted.