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In the style of
Hollywood disaster flicks, October saw the coincidental
release of two contests intended to highlight Indiana’s best blogs.
One competition, sponsored by
Linking Indiana,
features sixty-seven candidates divided into ten categories. Despite its name, the
Top 50 Indiana Blogs
program currently lists 189 entries and will take nominations through Tuesday,
October 27. Both of these battles rely on public voting over the web. Both projects
are great examples of how not to run an online contest.
Which of these mediocre competitors will be less forgettable? Vote early, vote often!
An Unfortunate Sampling
The legitimacy of any championship series rests in part upon the quality
of the contenders. If the hopefuls seem evenly matched or fairly segmented
by the contest organizers, the event seems equitable and worthwhile. If
some players have an unfair advantage or others appear to be laughably
unqualified, the entire endeavor comes under scrutiny. Hoosier blog
contests might not be as important as baseball or the supreme court, but most people won’t
enjoy a game if others do not follow the rules. For additional information
on this phenomenon, speak with any younger sibling.
When the Top 50 Indiana Blogs contest launched, an incredible
fifteen members of the initial list prompted obvious questions. There
were competitors listed twice, blogs that were only a few months old
with only a handful of posts, as well as contestants who didn’t even live
in Indiana or write about the Hoosier state! One entry consisted
almost entirely of articles that read: “More info coming soon.” These
errors are more than clerical, they are systemic. They do not reveal
a failure to execute well but a failure to plan.
Most of the initial selection issues with Top 50 have vanished thanks to the
constant reshuffling of rankings as controlled by the live poll. But the Linking
Indiana contest continues to suffer from embarrassing inconsistencies in
their leaderboard. For example both Gravy Masters and ProBlog Service cover ghost blogging, but one resides in the
“Business” category while the other is classified as
“Marketing.” That “Marketing&rdquo group also highlights the
Visit Indy blog, but an entry urging you to Visit Indiana
is in a category titled “Family.” Blogs about motherhood mostly end up
here as well, except for those which are placed in the “Hobby”
section. At least there’s no confusion about who will win Linking
Indiana’s “Legal” division, as this
category has only one contender.
What’s in a Blog?
An effort to determine Indiana’s favorite and/or Top 50 blogs should include
some definition of the word blog. Here’s a possibility from the most
definitive source
of community-edited folk wisdom:
A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with
regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such
as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological
order.
By this measure, at least three of the Linking Indiana contenders may not
really be blogs. A Greener Indiana is a full social
media portal built on the Ning platform. If that’s a blog,
then so is Smaller Indiana as well as
many
other
online
communities
built
for
Hoosiers.
Likewise, it’s hard to credit AtGeist.com as a true
blog, because this site just duplicates content from another
Ning site, AtGeist.net.
These battles are like a foot race between Usain Bolt, Rosie O’Donnell and a
fruit basket. Some of the entries aren’t much competition and
others are surreal.
A foot race between a true competitor, someone who is not a runner,
and a third entity that, although tasty, is not even the correct species.
Finally, I’d suggest that a competitive blog ought to have
some history and recency. Yet between the two contests, sixteen
blogs were just started this year. Half of these came into
existence within the last six months. Never Again!, an online memorial to the Holocaust, first
appeared in August of this year. The travel blog Europe on a single backpack offered
its final post in July. These are both fantastic showpieces, but should
they really be compared with the likes of venerated local blogs
Hoosier Beer Geek,
Indiana Barrister and
My Old Kentucky Blog,
all of which date from 2005 to the present? Adjusting for the effects of Internet time,
I think not.
Running Afoul of Skitt’s Law
Any complicated endeavor is subject to Murphy’s Law, but an online
kerfuffle is often prone to an important corollary:
Skitt’s Law - Any post correcting an error in
another post will contain at least one error itself.
Mike Seidle, an organizer of the Linking Indiana contest, decided to comment on
the presence of another top blog competition. In a post last week,
Seidle offered some friendly advice to the company running the Top 50 Indiana Blogs
program.
He writes:
A Little Advice to Brandswag [Corporation]
You might want to not let sponsors compete in your contest. They have an unfair
advantage over everyone else.
The fancy term for this notion is conflict of interest, and Seidle
is absolutely correct. At present, the Top 50 Indiana blog contest includes
several entries from Brandswag employees, current and former clients
and other contest sponsors. It’s too bad, then, that four of
the entries into Seidle's own blogging contest include his
own company, his partner, his employee and an affiliates
former business partners and employees.
All four of these individuals are identified as
voluntary contributors to Linking Indiana.
Mike Seidle is the a
former owner of Professional Blog Service along with Paul Lorinczi,
who in turn runs the Art of Persuasion blog. Erik Deckers works for
Pro Blog Service and is thus affiliated
with Seidle.
Kirk Abraham, who runs the EASTeam Insight blog, is listed as
a contributor to Linking Indiana. I have omitted a corresponding diagram
listing conflicts of interest for the Top 50 Indiana Blogs contest, but the
relationships are equally suspect.
Seidle is right that whoever is running a contest ought to exclude
themselves and their affiliates from the competition. He’s also right
when he notes the problems with
anonymous voting:
Lots of people have asked me why you have to register to vote in Indiana's
Favorite Blog contest. There's a simple answer, and the Indiana's Top 50 Blogs
contest by Kyle Lacy and Brandswag just illustrated it (BTW - I hope they can
get this fixed because it's a disaster for the contestants on Indiana's Top 50
Blogs if it does not get fixed)
Anonymous voting on the internet can easily be cheated, no matter what you do
to fix it. When you do an online contest, it's [sic] either can be gamed or
not. It's not an external issue it's the responsibility of the contest organizer to get
it right so contestents [sic] aren't jobbed. Last night, Chuck Goose's [sic] blog had
over 1000 votes. Now it's 289. Or is it? You have to take the time to
do things right.
The Hanging Chad
Seidle is correct in noting that it’s easy to cheat in the Top 50
Indiana blogs contest. To do, one simply has to notice that the act
of voting involves clicking an on-screen button, which subsequently
disappears. Therefore to place a fraudulent vote, one needs to merely
save the command so it can be repeated. This can be done
with a right-click to copy the code followed by pasting it into
the address bar. Repeat this process as often as you like to vote
up your favorite entry.
You can click the ‘Vote’ button once to support
Lindsay Manfredi, our resident Indianapolis rock star/blogger.
Or, you can note what appears in the link and reuse this text
to vote many times.
It’s possible to cheat in the Linking Indiana contest as well, but
it takes a little more work. That site does require users to register
to vote through a valid email address. So, a fraudster can rig the
outcome by setting up additional email accounts. It’s also
possible to vote twice due to a classic security vulnerability
called “SQL injection.” The details of this process
are complex, but I’d encourage Seidle and his team to check
their database for some mischievous data I inserted over the weekend.
How to Run a Contest
A competition to determine the best blogs in Indiana is likely not
an extremely serious endeavor. I doubt I’ll be contacted by the Federal
Election Commission for my exposé of the respective technical
and logistical weaknesses of these two contests. In fact, the real purpose
of both programs is, in the words of their creators, to “drive traffic”
to some of the great online content produced by Hooisers. In this regard,
controversy may help to counteract the growing disillusionment. Everybody
wins when more people read more Indiana blogs. Except, perhaps, those bloggers
in rival midwestern states.
To run a successful, legitimate contest, we should look to other competitions
for ideas. Those battles are characterized by rules and guided by
officials. There must be a clear intent to define who is eligible, how
the contest is run, and what actions will be considered or grounds for
disqualification. Kyle Lacy and Mike Seidle, incidentally, would make for
excellent judges. Both run successful social media companies and are
well-connected. They both possess the expertise to thoroughly debate and
precisely author regulations. Both can honestly and accurately evaluate
competitors. They represent an informed jury of experts.
Nevertheless, there is room in any contest for mass voting and public opinion.
While level-headed professionals should decide the final ranking, a blog competition
can have a “People’s Choice Award.” To be certain, this domain should
be secure against casual voter fraud. But ultimately, an online poll is inherently
inaccurate. The best assessment of quality comes from a blend of the opinions of
experts and the opinions of the masses. You, dear reader, matter as well.
Now go vote for the content that inspires you most.
Further Reading:
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