The 1st edition of RoBlogFest ended friday night with the awards ceremony and a colorful party at which I arrived a little late—long day at the office—after the awards ceremony, so the organizers surprised me with my own private VIP ceremony and preferential treatment. That felt really good. My gratitude goes both to the organizers and to those who voted for this blog: thank you, guys!

I had the opportunity to chat (off-line, for a change) with Antonio Eram – the grand-daddy of Romanian blogs, Radu Ionescu – the man who bets on 150 business blogs, Igu – the underground's telegraph, Oana Felipov – momentarily returned from the future, Fry – the mighty co-organizer of the event and Alex – the young shepherd of the Romanian herd of RSS feeds. In a word: exhilarating!

On saturday we got rid of the last traces of alcohol. Now it's sunday, so let's take a look at the wrap-up figures:
· Nominations – around 35 nomination in each category and a peak of 45 – that's a massive increase compared to the previous similar competitions. Paradoxically, a large number of nominations is not necessarily healthy for the competition, since it leads to a diluted focus in the voting process.
· Votes – around 870 votes per category and a peak of 1300 – the peak figure doesn't make sense. I can only presume that lots of people voted in the first category and then abandoned, discouraged by the huge number of options.
· Traffic – competition's traffic peaked at over 1100 visitors and over 4000 page views a day, and in the last week cumulated over 5500 visitors and 16000 page views – this shows how few we are in absolute figures, but how incredibly many compared to only a couple of years ago.

All in all, I'd say it was a terrific start. Now, for the 2nd edition I have a few proposals:

· Contact – how do the others do it? There must be some practices RoBlogFest can align to. It's worth having a look at Satin Pajama Awards or even at The Bloggies.
· A jury – because voting for 50 nominees is not very productive, the jury's job would be to cut down the nominations list to 5 (or 6 if we're talking a 6 months span, you know, mathematical beauty) in order to give the voting process some relevance and focus. Yes, it cannot be 100% objective and yes, there will be protests (of course!) but one cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs—this is the story in every festival's competition. The jury will kick in again at the end of the voting process, to validate the votes and the winners. The quirky cases will be debated and penalized or disqualified if fraud is uncovered beyond reasonable doubt.
· Best photoblog category – I'm happy for TTL's victory which proves that photoblogs can win elsewhere, but TTL is a photoblog that uses a lot of well-written text—I think photoblogs deserve a category of their own.
· Best newcomer category – it only makes sense to notice the best newcomer—in the last few months we've all witness the birth of some pretty strong blogs.
· Best humor category – not sure about this one, but here, this is a chance to think about it.

A few bullets about the idea to hold this contest twice a year:
Pros:
· The blogosphere moves quickly these days.
· It's for fun, after all (or it should be). Twice a year is two fold funnier.
Cons:
· It takes more than six months for a blog to evolve from one stage to another or to change significantly.
· The Best newcomer category becomes a bit restrictive at 6 months. Should it refer to the best blogs created in the last 12 months, anyway? Every blog would have two chances to compete, then.

Bottom line, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Dragos, congratulations for pulling this off, thank you and—to quote Mr. Fry—"keep doing it!"