What a night. On 17 October, the first ever Blog North Awards drew a capacity crowd to Manchester’s Deaf Institute to enjoy readings from shortlisted bloggers, indulge in some light boozing and/or schmoozing, and hear the long-awaited announcement of the 2012 winners. Impressively, we had people traveling from all across the North for the night’s event. Next year, we’re introducing geographic shout-outs: “Is anyone here from Sunderland?” “Can I get a Rotherham in the house?”

First on the programme were readings from four of this year’s shortlisted bloggers. They were expected to be pretty good, but they definitely exceeded those expectations. Liverpool blogger Amy Roberts (I never knew you were such a monster) shared her barbed tales of retail fascism, Simon Moore (Sonnet Reviews) read his totally original poetic cultural reviews, the wry observations of Huddersfield postie Kevin Boniface (The Most Difficult Thing Ever, winner of the best writing award) had people actually crying with laughter. People were tearing up for a very different reason during Len Grant’s reading, accompanied on stage by the young family at the centre of his documentary blog Her First Year (winner of the best personal blog award): Frances, Hassan and scene-stealing Mia.

The night’s headliner, author Adam Christopher read from his new superhero novel Seven Wonders (Angry Robot) and shared the secrets of his literary success in a frank and wide-ranging Q and A (a hint: blogging and twitter played important roles.) He even fielded random questions about robots with impressive finesse. Go buy his wonderful book.

And then, to an improvised drumroll provided by the audience’s feet, the winners were announced. Oh, how it made us proud to hear what an enormous cheer each shortlisted blogger got. Even though only one winner can be crowned – or okay, sometimes two; we did have a tie in the Young Blogger category this year – everyone really is a winner here. Now go forth and blog. We’ll see you next year. In the meantime, click on the thumbnails above to admire pictures of the event from photographer Roshana Rubin-Mayhew courtesy of Manchester Literature Festival.

The Blog North Awards are produced by writing organisation Openstories in partnership with Creative Tourist and The Culture Vulture. They are an annual feature of the Manchester Literature Festival, and are proudly sponsored by 34SP.

Best Arts and Culture Blog

The winner: A Negative Narrative

The runner up: Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second

Best City or Neighbourhood Blog

The Winner: Sevenstreets

The runner up: Unicycle Emptiness

Best Food and Drink Blog

The winner: Around the World in Eighty Bakes

The runner up: Squidbeak

Best Personal Blog

The winner: Her First Year

The runner up: A Different View

Best Specialist Blog

The winner: The Magic Square Foundation

The runner up: Fontilan

Best Writing

The winner: The Most Difficult Thing Ever

The runner up: Tiffers At: Otherwise I’ll Forget

Best Young Blogger

The winner is: A tie between Considerate Trespassing and Every Second Song

The runner up: Celluloid Wickerman

Click here to view the full shortlist for 2012.

The Blog North Awards will return in 2013 – watch this space!

A hearty thanks to WordPress hosting company 34SP.com in Manchester, UK. Thanks to them, this year’s winners will take home a domain name and free hosting for a year!

We’re also delighted that Creative Tourist, the arts magazine of the Manchester Museums Consortium, are sponsoring the awards.

They’re joined by our new partners, the Yorkshire blog Culture Vultures – check out their site here.

And we’ve got to give a shout-out to the folks at Manchester Literature Festival, who have supported this event from the very beginning. We’re delighted to be part of the festival, which takes place 8-23 October 2012, and if you haven’t taken a gander at this year’s especially cracking programme, haste over here and book your tickets while there are tickets left to book.

From the first day nominations open, the Openstories team look at every entry for the Blog North Awards, making a longlist of especially good blogs worthy of consideration for the shortlist in each of our eight categories. Briefly, we’re looking for an original concept, a strong individual voice or style, standout content and regular posting. Yes, it’s a lot of blogs to read, but we wouldn’t have started this if we didn’t love reading blogs.

With the input of the other Blog North organisers, we narrow this longlist down to a final shortlist of five for each category. This year we’ve also give a shout-out to two “commended” blogs which didn’t make the shortlist but which we liked very much.

This shortlist then goes to our judges, who read through the blogs, rank them from 1 to 5 in each category, and return their votes to us. At the same time that the judges are reading the blogs, the public are voting on our shortlist. The results of the public voting are then tallied together with the judges’ votes. We don’t believe the award should be a popularity contest, but feel it’s important for the reading public to have their say, so public votes equal one judge, or 1/7^th of the final vote.

Once all the votes are tallied up, we then we have our winners, who will be announced at the Blog North Awards evening event on 17 October (we’ll name a winner and a runner up for each category.) And that’s it, in a nutshell.

Any questions or feedback? Leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to assist you.

•     Stuart Maconie, author, journalist and and broadcaster
•     Meg Pickard, head of digital engagement at Guardian News and Media
•     James Brown, editor of Sabotage Times and previously, loaded and GQ magazines
•     Claire Malcolm, chief executive of New Writing North and Durham Book Festival
•     Mike Pinnington, co-founder and editor of Liverpool online arts magazine The Double Negative
•     Zoe Margolis, author and blogger, Girl With A One Track Mind

We’re frankly delighted that these fine people are all willing to contribute their time to the competition, and think they represent a pretty impressive concentration of smarts about blogging, writing, culture (northern or otherwise) and the digital world. In fact, we couldn’t think of anyone we’d rather have as our first ever judges.

So, know about any blogs they need to be reading? Get your nominations in before entries close on 7 September. The best of the nominated blogs will be put in a shortlist. Winners will be determined by tallying the results of public voting with the judges’ selections, and all will be revealed at our evening event on 17 October at The Deaf Institute in Manchester. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for you.

Blog North Awards organiser Kate Feld (yes, erm  – me. I never know whether to write these things first person or third. Okay, screw it. I’m going with first.) I did a mini-interview with Sarah-Clare Conlon over on the Manchester Literature Festival blog, and then wrote a little post on my own blog, Manchizzle. It’s funny to think about just how small and humble our first Manchester Blog Awards event was, all those years ago. Lots of the bloggers from that time have moved on to other things, but quite a few of the people who were shortlisted or there are still blogging. I’m looking at you Adrian Slatcher, Ian Pattinson, Elizabeth Baines and Keris Stainton.

Anyway. I really liked this post about Blog North over on The Double Negative. And judging by all the nominations coming in from Liverpool, a lot of others did too. Please help us spread the word on your own blog.

There’s an interesting debate developing in the comments, too, about whether The Northerner/BNAs are necessary efforts to offset London’s dominance of the media, or simply reinforce the region’s “chip on the shoulder” stereotype. What do you think?

Please keep them coming in, folks. If you’ve already entered your own blog, why not spread the love and put forward a few other blogs you admire? There’s no limit on how many nominations you can make, so go crazy.