Blogger’s Choice Awards:- XboxOZ360 listed.

Annual Blogger’s Choice Awards for 2008 closing soon

by XboxOZ360:

©2008 Grant Smythe:

The site has been nominated for some great awards this year through Blogger’s Choice Awards

Recently we were asked if we would like to enter the Blogger’s Choice Awards for 2008. So placed the site in 4 categories which you will find below.

However, to give you an idea of how we got here, we’d like to take a few minutes of your time to just tell you a little about us, and how we got to being asked to enter. Remembering, that without your support and constant readership, we would not be getting the excellent views we now enjoy.

First and foremost, this site is always about the reader.

Its aim is to inform you, give you real news and opinion pieces based on the news, not rehashed news items with minimal information and simply leading you to another site for the ‘real’ news.

Sure, we’ll direct you to the source, we always will do that, it would be irresponsible not to, but we will add own own personal twist to it, pass our own thoughts and comments on it and usually compile supportive information about the item in question. So that you the reader are more informed and navigate away knowing more than when you arrived.

So with that in mind, here’s some information on the site, and most importantly, how you can help us in gaining an award this year (2008)

Some Site History:

This humble little site has only been alive a little over 12 months now (with just 89 views for August ‘07), but it has gained a decent following since that time. With many readers now coming to the site from all corners of the globe to view the various unbiased reviews, news and opinion pieces about the Xbox 360 and gaming in general.

Visit our forums

All this excellent work is done by the 13 person team here at XboxOZ360-gamer who by the way, all volunteer their time to contribute to the site in some way every week. The team consists of members of the gaming world ranging in age from 15 years (who has his own company already - a very industrious young chap) to 55 years (yours truly), covering both genders, who are either single, couples right through to parents with their own children, some of which are in the 30’s and who are also gamers at heart.

It has been great seeing the site grow and gain momentum, especially over the last 6 months as the site really picked up speed. We have seen our readership go from a humble 2 - 3 thousand unique views each month around 6 months ago, to an average of 40 thousand p/mth.

July was our busiest month, which saw 58,953 thousand readers drop by to take a peek at what we had to offer. This was a spike of course due to E3 and the coverage we did on that event. Seeing that number of people on the site was just brilliant, and is a testament to all the 13 members on the team here at this blog, who’s Bio’s can be found on our About Us page.

5 of the top gaming sites are BLOGS

Why chose a Blog for a Gaming Website ?

While doing almost a year of research into setting up a “website” it was apparent that you needed some great software, a good designer and a decent amount of money sitting in the bank to help fund it, that is of course if you had little html background. If not, then it was considerably more to get one up and running.

The more that I looked into it, the more the thought of setting one up slipped away. Until I found some blogging software sites. The community in these sites were fantastic, and while still growing, blogs seemed to be moving away from the “personal diary” style of site.

They began moving into the professional arena, where major companies, news site and small business sites were using various blogging software to run their “web sites”. This allowed both editors and contributors that usually came from across the globe, to submit and compose and publish their items “on-the-fly” with relative ease extremely quickly.

Some people have the thought that “blogs” are the devil’s work, even the internet’s biggest pests and should be sent to the interweb graveyard, as they honestly believe “blogs” supply no “real” information, news or “valid” information. Those people fail to understand that a huge percentage of internet sites are now run by blogging software, and many major sites are actually blogs or blog-based.

I stumbled upon WordPress while searching for “Free Themes”. And yes, I actually used “Stumbled-Upon” as the means to locate WordPress.com. So when I found WordPress.com’s site, I thought all my dreams had come at once, and Santa had dropped his huge sack of toys and run off with someones mother, leaving ALL the toys for me. No such luck unfortunately, but I did feel that way.

The one huge thing that had me swing to WordPress was its ease of use, the simplicity of its interface, the brilliant community support, as well as the excellent 24/7 administrative support.

But the huge winning factor for me was - NO ADS. Yep, WordPress.com offered you full access to their excellent software running on their servers without the need to have any ads present on your sites. You could make your site look and feel the way you wanted it to, without those annoying flash ads or banners cluttering up your site and hindering you getting your message out there.

How can you help ?

Slip along and cast your vote now.

Any reader can vote for the site over at Bloggers Choice Awards, (however, you must register to vote - no catches or anything) and while they currently do not have a Game Site Category at the moment (hopefully next year they will), we have listed ourselves in the following 4 sections. So please feel free to slip along there and cast your votes in any of the the categories, or all, the choice is yours.

You just have to love the last one . . While I wouldn’t go that far, as there are some brilliant examples of blogging sites out there, but this one seemed like a category that would raise some interesting comments and a few well deserved laugh. Believe me, we’re certainly not taking it “that” serious, but it is nice to be in that listing all the same.

See you at the awards.

You can also pass this item on to many of your friends who might enjoy the site and might want to vote for it. The bigger we get, the more information we can deliver to you. We will not deviate away from supplying readers a unique approach on 360 gaming. Nothing is worse than landing at a site to find it is simply a stepping stone to another site for the actual source of the news item you have been seeking.

So we pride ourselves in NOT supplying every news detail on the web, and for NOT being simply a huge gaming news portal. We simply supply unique gaming information and opinion pieces ‘based’ on the news and events related to the Xbox 360, x720 (the next iteration of the Xbox platform) and gaming news in general.

Review our site at Blogged.com

We would love to hear your comments, and most importantly, your feedback on what you like, dislike and believe could help. As without that, we are simply fumbling along in the dark. A site is NOT about what we want as a site, but about what our readers want on a site they frequent. We believe we are doing that every month. So just know that your vote and feedback will help us continue on in that vein.

You can also “Review Our Site” over at Blogged.com where we have a 8.8 Editors Choice Review listing and are ranked #20 in their Video Games Blugs Listing and ranked #4 on their Xbox Blog Listing alongside greats like GamePro and Team Xbox.

Thanks for your vote

See you at the awards.

©2008 Grant Smythe: