Cheaters Spoil the Fun in Weblog Awards Voting (There's going to be a recount!)

By Rob Beschizza Email 11.09.07 | 8:31 PM

It's just too close to call.

Voting in the Weblog Awards, an annual blog competition that attracts a half million online votes, is getting the internet equivalent of a manual recount.

"You see it when you look at the logs," says Weblog Awards organizer Kevin Aylward. "Imagine a vote log of 20,000 votes: if you scan it, patterns emerge. But there shouldn't be patterns."

Aylward says as soon as he has returned from a conference he's attending, he'll scour the logs for evidence of cheating. He also raised the prospect of making the logs public. And for next year's awards, Aylward is considering using software-based pattern-matching techniques.

<snip>

In the tech section, the top gadget blogs Engadget and Gizmodo exchanged the lead twice in the final hour, with Engadget surging ahead in the final minutes.

According to Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait, "It was totally goofy from the start, and went deeper from there." Meanwhile, Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre praised Bad Astronomy and lamented how the debate had became a left- and right-wing issue for some voters.

<snip>

The Weblog Awards started as a conservative response to the Bloggies. Aylward stresses that he tries to maintain balance, but the fact that the awards are run and promoted by a conservative media group means it has often drawn a right-of-center voter base. A 2005 Online Journalism Review article pointed out that conservative blogs have won the Weblog Awards for years, although Aylward says this was less true in 2006 and 2007.

More:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2007/11/weblog_recount

:nopity:

Let me get this straight: there's a group that holds elections for conservative web entities, and it turns out that the results of those elections were tainted by the aforementioned conservatives cheating in order to win? How freakin' typical! (But watch them blame it all on the liberals...)

:rofl: