Bloggers Take the Stage

The jury reviewed several hundred blogs before selecting this year's award nominees, including well-known Swedish bloggers as well as lesser-known names. The bloggers will begin a full day of events with an inspiring afternoon tea party at Café Opera in Stockholm, a blogger's fashion show and the chance to have their makeup, hair and nails done. When they return, the venue will be transformed for the glamorous awards ceremony and after-party. For the first time this year, TV400 will broadcast both the live event and a month-long daily program featuring all of the finalists.

Sweden's blog readers have had a full month to vote from among 36 preliminary nominees in ten categories - this, in addition to the Blog of the Year Award, an open ballot in which the readers themselves can nominate their favorite. So far this year, an amazing 70,000 candidates have been nominated, and it's not hard to understand why. Last year's winner, Kenza Zouiten, has gone on to a job at MTV, launched two clothing collections and one shoe collection, and posed as a cover model for several magazines.

VeckoRevyn Blog Awards has so quickly become a topic of conversation in the blog world that it's easy to forget just how new the event and the blog boom itself, actually are. Just two and a half years ago, in the spring of 2007, the Swedish blog scene was still in its infancy.

For Fredrika Haglund, who was then a newly employed business developer at Veckorevyn.com after years of working with blogs, it was clear that VeckoRevyn would become the blog spotlight.

"The first event we organized was a clothing exchange evening with a few sponsors," recalls Fredrika. "Today, 'bloppisar' (a combination of the Swedish words for blog and flea market, where bloggers arrange events to exchange clothing with one another) have become very popular. But this was probably the first, even though we didn't use the same term to describe it."

The first event tapped into a great deal of enthusiasm, and VeckoRevyn quickly decided to focus more on bloggers in the coming year. They arranged sneak previews, inspirational events, fashion shows and panel debates - all exclusively for the bloggers who gradually grew closer to the magazine's sponsored events.

In the fall of 2008, VeckoRevyn arranged a large gala in Stockholm. 300 bloggers were invited, and Sweden's Minister of Culture dealt out the first prize for Blog of the Year.

"It was then that the Blog Awards really felt established," says Fredrika. "A lot of people came, and we got an amazing amount of attention from the press. We knew it would be big in the blog world, but we had no idea it would make an impact outside that circle."

The bloggers invited to the VeckoRevyn Blog Awards are all young women, a group that is rarely allowed a voice in public debates.

"Cultural bloggers, political bloggers and sports bloggers are all heard and seen in the news and on TV, but these girls really have no other forum despite the fact that they're the largest group of bloggers," explains Fredrika.

500 bloggers are invited to this year's VeckoRevyn Blog Awards, but there could be many, many more.

"This is definitely the biggest topic of conversation in the Swedish blog world," says Fredrika. "We have to turn down a lot of the requests we receive, and when we choose the nominees we have to consider both quantity and quality - that is, how often the bloggers write and how many people follow their blogs. Of course we invite the biggest bloggers, but part of our goal is to find a few undiscovered, unpolished diamonds."

For VeckoRevyn, there are a number of reasons for being involved in the Blog Awards.

"Most importantly, it's our most significant brand-building effort, and it's running the whole year. And it drives traffic to our site. Normally, we attract about 100,000 unique visits per week, but when the nominees were announced this year, that number climbed to 170,000. It's also our most profitable event. Both our sponsors and our partners know that this is a very important target group."

And although she's still in the midst of preparations for this year's gala, Fredrika has already starting thinking about next year's Blog Awards.

"We've got big plans, that's all I can say! Personally, I think we could fill up the whole Ericsson Globe (Stockholm's largest indoor arena with a capacity of 16,000 spectators) if we wanted to..."