• When is a vote counted?

• On Twitter, your tweet has to have these two components:

• #ejavote

• And the bit.ly URL of the article you're voting for.

• On Facebook, you simply need to become a fan of the story's Facebook Page. List the 14 Pages badges.

• How do you make sure people won't abuse the system?

We are relying on Facebook and Twitter's own security. We use Facebook pages'  fan counting system, and we rely on Facebook for not allowing people to be fan more than once. We're using the Twitter search API to search for the appropriate keywords in tweets, and we'll keep just one for each user! You could potentially create Facebook/Twitter accounts just to stuff the ballots... You can try, but there's a high chance our team of green hackers will help find you and publicly humiliate you ;-) And of course remove your votes.

• Voting is dumb, I want to rate the story.

When analyzing what happens with high numbers of ratings, you see that they tend to regroup around low score and around high scores. We save you the click if you don't like the story, but if you really like the story, go ahead and tell people about it, tell them to read it, tell them to vote! Even if your favourite doesn't win the prize, the journalist that wrote it will be thankful that you recommended it to your friends. And if you care about the issue, you'll want to spread the word about  it. That's the aim of the Earth Journalism Awards and we're glad you help us do it with your vote and your social network skills.

• Why do you allow people to vote several times, once on each network?

For each story we allow people to vote only once on the EJA site, once on Twitter and once on Facebook. You could say that your vote counts more if you tell your friends about it, since it will help more people participate in the competition and bring more value to the public prize and help people better understand climate change!

• The journalist with the most friends will win!

Unfortunately that's the nature of any public vote. It is a popularity contest at worse, but we count on you to read the stories before casting your vote! As you see on our website, when you have voted for a story, other stories in the competition are also displayed so that you can read more compelling stories about climate change, and pick one more favourite. This is your vote, its up to you to make the best story win!

• Why don't you count votes on... (Digg/Delicious/Mixx/Buzz/Newsvine/Propeller/StumbleUpon/...)?

We're thinking about it for the next awards, but until then feel free to spread the word on all your favorite social networking platforms. The more you help these stories get around, the more you contribute to help the world get smart about cimate change.