To the person who voted from the same IP and used the below details. I am going to delete every vote from that IP block including valid votes with valid emails. You are quite lucky I don’t name you, your company and your blog. It’s not just you either which is a shame and makes my job calculating the votes that little bit more difficult.

im jim@hotmail.com
tim tim@hotmail.com
fjim@hotmail.com fjim@hotmail.com
m@hotmail.com m@hotmail.com
ghfg@hotmail.com hghg@hotmail.com
iouyih@hotmail.com uhgughu@hotmail.com
676@hotmail.com 87y68@hotmail.com
pat pat@email.com 1

Thank you to the 1000 people that have voted so far. I will be sending out an email this weekend to thank those that have voted and letting them know that one of them will be the winner of an O2 i-mode mobile phone. This mailshot will also be a way of verifying email addresses. If any emails bounce then their vote will be removed from the database. Only fair I think.

On Monday I will announce the short list and I will also announce the winner of the first phone.

In the meantime please encourage the last few people who you haven’t begged and pleaded with to vote.

O2 love the idea of the blog awards and as a result I’ve been given a few Samsung s500i i-mode phones to give away. Thank you O2.

So, what am I going to do with them? Well first as a thank you for those that have voted, I will randomly pick a name of a voter on Monday (voting ends on Friday but we can build the suspense til Monday!) and they will get a voucher for a Samsung s500i to be redeemed from the O2 experience store on Grafton street. They seem quite nifty, the specs are below, worth a few hundred quid from what I can tell. So now there’s another reason to get your friends to vote. SO GET VOTING!

On the night of the event amongst the spot prizes will be two more vouchers for Samsung s500i i-mode phones.

O2 didn’t have any preconditions on these, just that they hoped you liked them and enjoy them. But they’re now in my hands so I’m adding a precondition. I want to you blog about the phone when you get it. It doesn’t have to be gushing or anything but just blog about your phone.

Now here’s the specs

The Samsung S500i is the stylish i-mode flip phone brought to you exclusively from O2. The phone has some excellent features such as:

* i-mode – access to loads of top internet sites on your mobile such as Paddy Power, lastminute.com, Sky Sports and News, Entertainment.ie, Daft.ie, RecruitIreland.com, Car Buyers Guide and Buy and Sell plus many more great sites.
* i-mail – your own email and messaging service, which allows you to send and receive emails and messages to and from the internet and other mobiles. Plus i-mail is free until March 31st.
* An Integrated 1.3mega pixel camera
* An MP3 Player
* Video Record and Playback
* Downloadable games
* Bluetooth Technology
* Triband

Voting ends on Friday. There are a lot of blogs neck and neck in many categories, so good people try and inspure more people to vote. 720 people have voted so far.

We’re talking on Newstalk at 12.30 today about the Blog Awards.