Would be really good to see if this category is eliminated from season 3 & going forward.

I couldnt agree more with Aagree..

Could you please provide us with links to all the respective travelogues

Aargee babu - votes are the only 'objective' judgement criteria, the other 4 are totally subjective. I am of the impression that most competitors would be happy if any element of personal bias of the jury is eliminated through as much objective evaluation as possible rather than leaving the final choice just on the judges internalized evaluation. But in things like these blogs, there is rarely a direct objective measure applicable. So ideally the voting thing brings in a touch of objectivity and leaves some bit of control in the hands of the blogger once he's uploaded his blog. And encouraging promotion through voting is one way the sponsors too get their much-needed eye-balls on the campaign, which is only fair. Also, ideally, there should be no manipulation in this voting. But then we do live in a real world that has almost everything coming in shades of grey. But thankfully for every crook there's a cop around if you know what I mean.

Apart from policing, the 'grey' has been largely offset by giving the votes just a fifth of the influence on the overall result. The other 4 criteria together weigh-in 4 times more than voting numbers. I think voting shall be around and utopia shall still be elusive.

The winner's blogs

Uploaded blogs

Finalists blogs

Old Fox sir... I completely agree with you, but I guess this grey area can further be minimized by bringing in a "more-fair" voting mechanism. Right now one just needs to create an email id and vote from it and also there are some other means (which I prefer not to mention here). I guess a better Idea would be facebook likes, after all the major publicity is coming from social media only. This option can also be misused, but then one has to create an email id first and then create a facebook profile, which is a bit more tedious than just creating an email id. Might be this would make it a bit more fair. this is just a thought that came to my mind seeing the surge of votes in the last day of round 1.

I understand Surojit and the surge in voting close to the finish line each time was expected.The ride up the learning curve continues however and even though utopia might not actually be attainable, we do strive to get as close to it as can be. Your concept with facebook 'likes' counting as votes is a pretty valid one. Do share more such thoughts on such process improvements. And yes do be around for TW3 too

+1 and if Votes arent a criteria then why advertise them on the website?
Why not give the judges "Objective score" before hand if you want to negate the bias?
This for every entry with constructive critcism if "unbiasedness" is what we strive for?
Say 1 point from a judge = 25 other votes initially
So if you guys rate a picture 10, that is as much as 250 votes for that picture!
Then finally let the jury decide on who qualifies and why

I speak for myself and honestly I gave up when I saw my rank spiraled from Rank 2 to 7 in a matter of a night! Worst this was with a Vote gap of as much votes as I had! These were from people that went from 0-2000Votes faster than a fully loaded loose bladder!
Why not disqualify the fake voters during the initial stages itself?

And please do not allow text blogs to post 100s of pictures instead of "blogging" about it!!! That is mighty unfair to those who chose to photoblog.

This was my entry to the contest. Decided to ride on instead of asking for votes when the votes took an unfair leap.. You might call it giving up. I call it giving up too. Just on different aspects.
True Wanderers 2.0 - Entries

They were a criteria but carried 1/5th the potency for the final selection.
The figure like '25' would be the crux and not realistically definable. Why not 20 or 30? The subjectivity would still remain - just that it would be numerical now. Might look better but will not necessarily be so. The classic case of a digital thermometer seeming to be more accurate than the analog one cause you see those figures past the decimal . Falsity of precision is as bad a trap as an obvious error is.

That shall be one major change in the coming contests.

A fair demand. And to talk in retrospect, the stage 1 to stage 2 filtering was not done on 'vote ranking' basis entirely. The process was not so mechanical actually. There weren't so many entries that they could not at least be looked through once before being relegated to the 'not made it through to stage 2 bin'. Your's is a case in point here and this comes from one of the horse's mouth - despite the 'low' votes, your photoblog was right up there amongst the top few in the stage 1 filtering. That is no consolation though I understand

The older and the wiser put it down to experience and hit the road again. Be around Satyen.

Congrats to milind winning the contest truewanderers 2 .I really enjoyed this ride along with other contestents and made really good friends through this endeavour.