Mr Bagel: Akiva reports on reasons why the voting was temporarily halted

Wednesday, 16 May 2007

Akiva reports on reasons why the voting was temporarily halted

In a bizarre scenario Mr Bagel happen to be on the computer burning the early morning oil, I noticed Akiva was logged into his gmail account.
Which for me was surprising as I dont think I've ever had more than one conversation with Akiva via gmail. I don't think either of us are the 'messaging guru' type.

I glanced occasionally noting who might be on board the Gtalk express but was really too occupied to take any real notice.

After finishing the New Mystery Blogger Series in the wee hours of this morning I decided it might be a good time to see how much I'm being trounced in Best Design Blog [results and voting] and how well (yay!!) in the JIB's I'm going in 'Best Of the Rest Blog' [results and voting]

Now I happen to care about the results of the JIB, and I make no apologies for this.

Best New Blog
Best New blog is an interesting category as its a good indicator (or should be) of rising stars of the JBlogosphere I have been keeping any eye on it to see who is who in the zoo.

Now I was pretty surprised considering the technorati ranking and traffic that Jew and the Carrot gets that they have managed to all of a sudden tally- 465 votes.

Jew and the Carrot

I brought this to Akiva's attention:
(I have no malice I don't know who runs this blog nor do I overly particularly care)

Akiva has stated:

"Our investigation has shown a valid cause for the vote surge you spotted with The Jew and The Carrot. Turns out this blog is associated with an organization, and they emailed the whole organization to come vote. 5 minutes after their email, the vote surge started. The surge did not show any symptoms of previous hacks, all votes appeared kosher, only the pure volume. (And that's why we suspended to do more research, a hack that clean would require an immediate stop to maintain integrity.)

We have now actually received an email from another org blog, noting the surge via the email (seems they share some members, who forwarded the email to them), and intend to do the same.

If the JIBs are run in the future, clearly rules about HOW and WHERE one can ask for votes (like, only on the blog or be disqualified) as well as specific categories for organization, professional, and media blogs versus private bloggers must be created.

Akiva

BB: Akiva makes some good points, what do others think about this?

Please comment on the Cross post located here: JIB Chatter