For those of you who have been following the Open Web Awards, nominated someone, or have been nominated yourself, you’ll be happy to know that today starts the beginning of round 1 of the voting process.

This is your chance to let your voice be heard about your favorites.

Below is the voting widget with all of the nominations in each category. Voting is open from today until Sunday, November 30th at 11:59 pm.

For the nominations round, I had alot of you visiting my blog, but I wasn’t sure if you had actually made your nominations. So if you cast your vote, please let me know you voted by leaving a comment.

If you can’t see the widget in your feed reader, please visit steven-sanders.com to cast your vote.

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This blog, started only a little over 2 months ago, has grown in leaps and bounds in reference to traffic, rankings, brand, and all out “bad-assness” (new word for you).

The Great News

Today I am happy to announce that you will now see my blog sitting among the company of Shoemoney, Problogger, John Chow, CopyBlogger, Dosh Dosh, Chris Garret, and many more.

I was added to the blogging niche list in the Alltop directory, which is another giant step towards my goals as a blogger.

A Little About Alltop

Alltop is the “magazine rack” of all the top bloggers on the web, sorted by niche categories.  Straight from Alltop’s about page is some information on who runs alltop and how it was started.

“Nononina is the company that owns Alltop. It is “two guys and a gal” in a garage—or more accurately, one guy in home office (Will Mayall), one gal on a kitchen table (Kathryn Henkens), and one Guy in United 2B (Guy Kawasaki). They’ve been working together since the previous century and are still friends.

This is the true story of Alltop. If you hear anything else from us, it’s because we retroactively changed the story for marketing purposes. We are the creators of Truemors, a site that is “NPR (or CBC) for your eyes” in the sense that it contains unusual breaking news, stories, and rumors like what you’d hear on NPR. A bit after the site’s launch, our friend Thomas Marban included Truemors in his single-page aggregation of news and tech sites called popurls.

We noticed that popurls sends Truemors as much traffic as Google. Clearly, he was onto something: Aggregate and display a bunch of sites for people, and they will come. This got us thinking about other topics that (a) have a large readership and (b) hasn’t been aggregated in an elegant and efficient manner, and we came up with idea of a doing a popurls of celebrity gossip sites. Then one thing led to another: Why not other topics like gaming, sports, politics, Macintosh, fashion, etc.?

If we had stopped at just celebrity gossip, we could have stuck with one clever domain, but we had to figure out a way to gather everything together when we kept going. “Sugar” was taken, so we came up with “Alltop” as in “all the top” stories—you get it. Alltop is the main website that hosts all the subtopics like celebrities, fashion, egos, sports, and gaming.”

To see me sitting in my place among the stars, visit the blogging niche at alltop here.

Tell me how bad-ass I am in the comments.

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The nominations begin today and will run through Sunday, November 16th.  So nominate your favorites, before it’s too late, using the nomination widget below.

I am an Open Web Awards Blog Partner, so be sure to come back often for up-to-date news as the Open Web Awards progresses.

Rules For Voting

Here are the Open Web Award rules as laid out by Mashable:

Categories & Possible Nominees

I’ve listed some of the categories and possible nominees below, as an example for you to use when casting your nominations.  These are by no means the only possible nominees.

• Social Networking Applications – Twitter, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, FriendFeed, etc.
• Social Bookmarking – Digg, Del.icio.us, Sphinn, etc.
• Photo Sharing – Flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photrade, etc.

If you’d like to give other readers ideas on possible nominations, please leave a comment.

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The Open Web Awards is only in its second year, but the first year saw over 250,000 votes and had over 50 internationl blog sponsors.  It had a big turn-out of competitors such as Facebook, Digg, Google, Meetup, Twitter, Netvibes, woot!, Last.fm and Mahalo.  I can only suspect that it will be 10 times larger this year than it was last year.

What Is The Open Web Awards?

Right from Mashable’s own website, the Open Web Awards is labeled as:

The only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories. This year, we’re partnering with over 100 blog partners, Poll Daddy for extra security and ease of voting and extending the nominations period and voting rounds for greater participation.

Becoming An Open Web Awards Blog Partner

Becoming a blog partner is as simple as clicking here, filling out the application form, and waiting on a reply from Adam Hirsch to let you know if you fit the criteria and are accepted.

What Are The Criteria?

• Must have a readership of more than 50 RSS Subscribers
• Must be able to post 1 to all of the category Nomination and Voting Widgets
• Must be able to meet deadlines during the timeframe for posts

What Are The Benefits?

Each blog partner receives:

• Logo and Link on OpenWebAwards.com
• Logo in select Open Web Awards related posts
• One Vote Per Category to decide the “Blogger’s Choice” Winners

Mashable is accepting over 100 blog partners this year, so make sure you signup to become an Open Web Awards blog partner today!  It’s FREE!

Let me know if you’ve signed up as a partner in the comments below.

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Today marks the first day of the “iRock Award“.  An award that I will give to the best of the best in the blog world.  But the best don’t just get an award, you’ll also get a chance at winning $100.  And best of all, it’s free to enter.

How To Enter the Contest

If you’re interested in applying to win the “iRock Award“, simply subscribe to my rss feed with a feed reader or subscribe by email, then use my contact form to let me know you subscribed, as well as to send me your blog website address.

From all of the entries I receive, I will choose an “iRock Award” winner for the month.  That winner will get a FREE review of his/her blog, and be entered for a chance to win a quarterly $100 giveaway.

Since the $100 giveaway will be quarterly, finalists will have a 1-in-3 chance of winning the money.

How To Win the Contest

The winners of the “iRock Award” will be chosen based upon the following criteria:

• Consistency of posts – It doesn’t matter if you post twice a day, once a day, or 2-3 times a week, as long as your consistent.  I prefer the contestant post a minimum of 2-3 times a week.
• Original Content – Don’t start a blog scraping other people’s content in hopes that you’ll win some money.
• Overall Design – You don’t have to have the flashiest blog to win.  Your design simply should compliment your blog and look clean.  It should be easy to navigate without confusing your readers.

Reason Behind the Contest

My biggest reason for running this contest is to help push all of you to work more on blogging, and to achieve the goals you’ve set to make money online.

I really believe that if you try hard enough, and spend enough time on your blog (look at it like a business), as well as write good content, you will eventually make enough money with your blog to live comfortably.

What If I Don’t Win?

If you’re blog doesn’t make it as an “iRock Award” winner, and you’re interested in getting a review of your blog done, then I do offer paid reviews.

Give me your opinions of the “iRock Award” contest in the comments below.

* Important Update:  Sadly the iRock award is being canceled due to the lack of participation.  I will try to start it again later down the road, and when I do, those 2 or 3 that entered will still be in the running.

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