The reason The Weblog Awards is 10 days and the reason one vote a day is the rule is to level the playing field. I'll admit that I stumbled onto the formula in 2003 while trying to devise a system that would give blogs with lower daily readership a chance against blogs with much higher daily traffic. Call it the InstaPundit influence... I surmised that someone like InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds would probably link to the inaugural edition of the awards only once. If the voting period was one day and he linked to the poll how, I figured, would a site with 1/10th of his daily traffic be able to compete?

The answer, of course, was to extend the voting period and allow for multiple votes, thus giving determined challengers a chance to send members of their smaller audience back to the polls repeatedly in contrast readers from other blogs who might only visit once or twice. The idea behind The Weblog Awards has always been to level the playing field in as many of the categories as possible. That idea is what lead to the creation of the Ecosystem categories. I figured that blogs in proximity to each other in the TTLB Ecosystem would be aligned closely in readership as well - making them natural competition for each other.

Background on the awards is here. Now, please, go over and vote for all your favorite blogs, or at least the best of the top 250 category.