The shortlist for the 2010 A4UAwards Community Shortlists have been announced on Affiliates4U and there are some genuinely pleasant surprises in amongst the nominations. There’s also some good news for OneLittleDuck in the blog category, so thanks for the nomination.

This year the awards have taken a small leaf out of The Oscars and increased the number of nominations in most categories – not quite to 10 – but at least six! Only the Publisher of the Year remains on five nominations, which is bizarre as you’d think this should generate more nominees? Two 100% cashback sites (Quidco and Topcashback) will battle out with Vouchercodes.co.uk and Skimlinks (who won everything last year) for the award. The fifth nominee is Shopstyle and it’s nice to see something different in the group.

There are 8 nominees for “Affiliate Manager: In-House or at an Agency” including Naomi Brown from Firebox, Hannah from Existem AM and John Jupp from Affiliate Program Advice. Daniel Austin and Chris Worthy from R.O.EYE, Karen Clayton of Azam Marketing, Joanna Halstead of i-level and Joshna Patel of Red Letter Days complete the group.

Best Account Manager at a Network has 7 nominees and they include James Little of Affiliate Future, Darren Newmark from LinkShare and Aga Marchewka of buy.at! Helen Collins of affilinet, Chantal Williams and Julie Wood of Affiliate Window and Anne Budden of Affiliate Future are also nominated.

Both those categories are just about impossible to call! If Ladbrokes had a book on this they’d probably do better than they do with The Oscars where there’s always a 1/40 nailed on favourite for each of the main categories.

The Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2010 is possibly slightly easier to predict.

I’d be surprised if Kirsty doesn’t take top place again. However could we have an Avatar vs The Hurt Locker situation as the nominations bring up two surprises. Firstly well done to David Fiske who thoroughly deserves his nomination and also well done to eBay for their Partner Network Blog. I think that’s the first time a merchant blog has broken through in this category? Joining Kirsty, David and eBay are Lammo.net and previous winner Kieron. Plus there’s of course OneLittleDuck.

Finally there’s the best Affiliate Marketing Network. Affiliate Window, Affilinet, Affiliate Future, Commission Junction, LinkShare and Paid On Results will battle it out for this one. I think it’s fairly obvious which way this one will go but you never know do you? It’d be a surprise to see Awin not (A)win again.

All in all it’s quite an interesting set of nominations. The changes made by A4U this year most certainly have resulted in two fiercely competitive awards (Affiliate Manager and Account Manager) that you could really pick any one nomination as a deserved winner. Only one voucher code site in the publishers group could be seen as a surprise but it’s nice to see ShopStyle in the mix. No Loquax though – boo, hiss etc. It’s good to see a merchant in the blogs group though.

A big well done to everyone who’s been nominated and thank you if you nominated/vote for this blog, it’s really appreciated.

You can cast your Community Award votes over at A4UAwards from the 22nd March.