There are over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was over a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

So please take all this into account when casting your votes, here are some more details on the voting:

• You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 50 will be determined.
• Blogs are listed on the ballot  in alphabetical order with the current top 25 blogs highlighted in bold & underlined text, so please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
• New this year we also having voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The choices of which blogs to include in the categories was the result of this survey and my best guessing. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
• Voting will run until 2/7, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special podcast with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer live at VMware Partner Exchange.
• Several random voters will be picked to win a copy of the Train Signal’s  new vSphere 5 and View 5 video training courses.
• Duplicate vote protect is enabled, we’ll be using geolocation, IP addresses & cookies to protect against duplicate votes. This isn’t Chicago, please be honest and fair when voting, any suspicious votes will be tossed.
• If you are not familiar with a blog you can use my vLaunchpad to see links to them all. Try not to pick blogs based just on names but also take content into account. There are a lot of good blogs currently not in the top 25 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over to http://vote.vsphere-land.com to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them. In case you need it here’s the direct link to the survey as well.

Special thanks to Train Signal for sponsoring the voting!

The polls will open next week for the annual VMware/virtualization top blog voting, so if you want to make sure your site is included make sure I have your blog listed on my vLaunchPad. This year will be a bit different, instead of just a top 25 we’ll also have categories kind of like they do at many awards shows. Some of the categories will be Best New Blog, Best Storage Blog, Blogger You Most Want To Meet, etc. I’m still playing with the categories so sound off in the comments if you have any ideas.

I’ll be closing the survey tomorrow morning at 9:00am EST so I have time to tabulate the results for the vChat awards episode that we’ll be recording on Friday. We hope to publish the latest vChat and the results on Monday. So if you haven’t voted yet head on over and vote.

Vote Now

There are over 100 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top 25 blogs. The last voting was back in January and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

So please take all this into account when casting your votes, here are some more details on the voting:

• You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 25 will be determined.
• Blogs are listed on the ballot with the current top 25 listed first followed by the remaining blogs in alphabetical order.
• Voting will run from 9/14 - 9/24, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special edition of the vChat podcast with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer.
• Two random voters will be picked to win a copy of my book, Maximum vSphere or a copy of the Train Signal vSphere Pro Series Vol. 2 video training course.
• Duplicate vote protect is enabled, we’ll be using geolocation, IP addresses & cookies to protect against duplicate votes. Because of this voters in corporate environments or using shared IP addresses may not be able to cast votes. Use computers with unique IP addresses instead. This isn’t Chicago, please be honest and fair when voting, any suspicious votes will be tossed.
• Prizes will be awarded randomly to some of the top blog winners, prizes are to be determined but may include NFR vendor licenses, books, shirts and more.
• If you are note familiar with a blog you can use my vLaunchpad to see links to them all. Try not to pick blogs based just on names but also take content into account.  There are a lot of good blogs currently not in the top 25 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over to http://vote.vsphere-land.com to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them that you appreciate them. Special thanks to Train Signal for sponsoring the voting!

Note: You won’t be able to complete the survey from an iPhone/iPad due to the drag & drop interface used to rank the blogs.

Here’s a table with the vote totals for all the VMware/virtualization blogs included in the survey, there were a few others that only had 1 or two votes that I didn’t include. Total votes includes any vote a blog received whether it was 1 through 10. Total points is the sum of each vote times it’s appropriate weight for the position (#1 vote = 10 points, #2 vote = 9 points, all the way down to a #10 vote = 1 point).

Voting for the top VMware/virtualization blogs will close this Friday night , 1/15 at 10:00pm MST so if you haven’t voted yet be sure and get your vote in. Over 850 votes have been cast already and the Top 25 blogs will definitely look different than it is right now. The results will be announced on Monday after I spend the weekend going through the data, I’ll be publishing a Powerpoint presentation converted to Flash with the voting details and the winners. So stay tuned…

I’ve been putting together the top 10 and lately the top 20 VMware blogs based on a few factors but this time around I wanted to poll the user community to see what they thought the  top VMware blogs were. Well the people have spoken, there were about 350 votes cast, a few duplicates (I track voters IP addresses, you know who you are) and the results have been tabulated and the new top 5 is ready to be announced. I weighted the votes with a #1 vote being worth 5 points, #2 vote worth 4 points, #3 vote worth 3 points, #4 vote worth 2 points and a #5 vote worth 1 point. I was going to put together a little slideshow with the results but have been too busy so without further ado here’s the results and your new top 5:

1. Yellow Bricks - Duncan Epping - 102 first place votes - weighted score of 991
2. Scott Lowe’s Blog - Scott Lowe - 39 first place votes - weighted score of 707
3. Virtual Geek - Chad Sakac - 61 first place votes - weighted score of 550
4. NTPro - Eric Sloof - 12 first place votes - weighted score of 412
5. RTFM Education - Mike Laverick - 5 first place votes - weighted score of 232

Congratulations to the winners! You guys work hard and produce some fabulous posts and you deserve to be on top. Rounding out the top 10 were the following blogs:

VM/ETC - Rich Brambley - 5 first place votes - weighted score of 196
Virtualization Evangelist - Jason Boche - 4 first place votes - weighted score of 190
Gabe’s Virtual World - Gabe Van Zanten - 5 first place votes - weighted score of 132
Virtualization Pro - Various - 3 first place votes - weighted score of 129
Mike D’s blog - Mike DiPetrillo - 3 first place votes - weighted score of 120

I probably won’t get around to updating the vLaunchpad until next week. I’ll be doing this again in 6 months and next time I’ll be using a better survey tool and you’ll get to choose the whole top 20. There are a great many blogs in the VMware community right now and just because you are not on the top 20 right now doesn’t made you are not worthy, just that you have a lot of competition; but bloggers come and go and it’s sometimes hard to devote time to a blog so keep up the great posts and you are sure to make the list someday.