Lonely Planet Labs

The Lonely Planet 2009 Travel Bloggers Awards

Matthew CashmoreLonely Planet author

With all this work going on for blogsherpa, it occurred to us that as well as paying people for their travel related blog posts, we should also do some awards for Travel Bloggers.

We thought that, being LP, we could probably come up with some pretty cool prizes, in a pretty cool place, and perhaps - if we push the boat out - some kind of trophy type thing. Maybe.

So, rather quietly (because I’ve not sorted the details yet) I’m announcing The Lonely Planet 2009 Travel Bloggers Awards - or the TLPTBAs - may have to work on that.

The idea, is to open nominations first thing in Jan in a few categories (suggestions? comment below), close them at the end of Feb - then set up a panel of rather cool people made up of brilliant bloggers, some of our authors and commissioning editors and let them vote BUT… their vote would only make up 50% of the overall socre - the other 50% would come from the public via online voting.

The winners would then be announced with rather grand fanfare in San Francisco in March 2009, at a party of some sort.

That’s it really - I’ll create a new tag (lpawards) here for the awards and as they develop I’ll update more here. Ideas, suggestions and thoughts most welcome.

UPDATE:

Okay, loads of suggestions for categories via twitter - so far:

• Best Destination Blog
• Best Expat Blog
• Best Travelouge
• Best Consumer Travel Blog
• Best non-English language Blog
• Best Video Blog
• Best Micro-Blogging (twitter etc)
• Best Image based Blog
• Best Themed Blog (trekking etc)
• Bet Group Authored Blog
• Best community engagement

Keep them coming and we can narrow them down for the opening of nominations in Jan.