By-election campaign: And the Blogger award goes to...

This is 2008. Students have laptops in class. When you do a class presentation, odds are, they are on Gmail, Hotmail, NYT, whatever. Why not use that to your advantage?

Here are the First (and last) Annual Blogger Awards™.

Running in the category of best website... *Drum roll*

Winner: Dean Haldenby.
Runnerup: Joseph Wesley Richards II.
No-show: Renaud-Philippe Garner.

Dean Haldenby had the only thing resembling a cohesive website in this election campaign. It does not compete with this website, but it works. The blog portion of the blog was disappointing, and very rarely updated. That being said, he had pictures, but could have used some video. The pictures were not great, and I am not sure why he used some of them that were there. Luckily, he redeemed himself by putting these up today. Note to Dean: Scrap the bar photos. The Q&A was a good concept, but did not use it enough. All in all, good website, but could have easily been better.

JWRII had a good blog. In fact...

Running in the category of best Blog *Drum Roll*

Winner: Joseph Wesley Richards II
Runner-up: Dean Haldenby
No-show: Renaud-Philippe Garner

Strong blog by JWR2. He posted one steady entry a day and tackled on big issues. The website lacked a bit of cohesion and/or multimedia. But all in all, if you read through his posts, you get someone that is following the campaign trail and is resAponding to events as they happen. If JWRII had a better team, he could have built himself a better website to accompany his blog. Nonetheless, JWR2 "got it". He understood that people will only go to a website if it is updated regularly.

Haldenby had a blog in name only. He could have easily posted more and it is unfortunate that he did not, as it would have allowed him to reach out directly to visitors of his website.

As for Renaud-Philippe Garner, I must say, he missed out the most. His presentations were by far the "loudest" and he was able to captivate the most attention. Had he plugged a website, he would have been able to control the message, through blog entries and videos. I must say, he is the only candidate to date to have released a video (he has two) and he could have easily stuck them on a blog. His blog entries would have probably been the most eccentric and could have easily sparked debates elsewhere.

Photos courtesy of Jason Chiu. The SFUO2 Blog™ exclusive.