[Update November 13, 7:22 AM PST: Both Jon Swift (see comments) of the eponymous blog, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo have taken clueless exception to this post, without having bothered to actually read it. We sincerely hope that you, Dear Reader, don't fall into the embarrassing trap of making accusations that don't actually jibe with statements made herein. Then again, you may not be emotionally invested in the phony awards discussed below. -- The Management]
Well, there was some kind of vampiric “blog” conference in Las Vegas this week. At the end, they handed out the Weblog Awards 2007. After all, you know you’ve arrived as a genre when they have conventions and hand out awards, right? (Just ask science fiction.)
Ghod Nose, they hyped it enough, making sure to advertise it on Memeorandum for months as a “sponsor” blog posting. And, they came up with a “voting” scheme that just SCREAMED to be hacked, which meant that you could vote once every 24 hours throughout the week that the voting was allowed. Get it? It’s just a “popularity” contest, with whoever can spoof the most votes the winner.
And I firmly believe that it was hacked. But let’s confine ourselves, for a moment to “best blog.”
I thought it would be interesting to track this category, and this was what I came up with. This was the vote on November 2nd. Pretty much what you’d expect, except that there is that ONE blog at the bottom that I’ve never heard of (and I know a little something about blogging.)
And then, here is the final ‘vote’ — which is so weirdly skewed that you wonder what the hell is going on.
Now, you notice that little blog at the bottom that nobody’s heard of? Look at that vote total. Of all the great blogs, left and right, past winners and current whiners, the vote totals look OK until you get to that last figure, 44.7% of the total vote for “PostSecret”?
Even MORE interesting is that, unlike many of these blog, there was NO SOLICITATION for votes on the PostSecret site. In fact, there’s barely a BLOG on the PostSecret site. Seriously. The domain itself wasn’t even registered until July of this year! Whois sez:
POSTSECRETCOMMUNITY.COM
Registrant: Make this info private
Instant Information Systems, Inc.
13345 COPPER RIDGE RD
GERMANTOWN, MD 20874-3454
USDomain Name: POSTSECRETCOMMUNITY.COM
Administrative Contact , Technical Contact :
Instant Information Systems, Inc.
FRANK@DOCDEL.COM
13345 COPPER RIDGE RD
GERMANTOWN, MD 20874-3454
US
Phone: 301 540 4864
Fax: 301 540 1413Record expires on 30-Jul-2017
Record created on 30-Jul-2007
Database last updated on 30-Jul-2007
There you go. Site is created three months ago, and the blog is barely there.
Who is PostSecret?
This is what it says:
The PostSecret website is the largest advertisement-free Blog on the web.
105,867,478 [which one assumes is the number of 'hits' -- HW]
Some HarperCollins author who stumbled on a “lifelong” scam: people send him “secrets” on postcards and then he posts them. Or, if you’d like, you can leave audio secrets. This seems to appeal mostly to teenage girls, and most all of the secrets are fairly lame, but the author has four books, and his own little franchise, like Kermit Shafer used to have with “bloopers”: he can keep publishing these meaningless junk-food-for-the-brain books until hell freezes over, because, to paraphrase Lincoln, Ghod must have loved Boobs, because he made so many of them. Sheerest boobery, no archives and and virtually no commentary using Blogger.com’s most basic template, which suggests that:
- The number of hits since July 30 might not be accurate (now, to be fair, the blog may have existed for a long time prior to July 30, but in the absence of any archives, that seems a little ‘iffy’*)
- IF the number of hits involved is bogus, the number of votes (which are more than double the number of votes in any other Weblog Awards category) were created out of whole cloth too — in a voting process that INVITES cheating.
- The people who run the Weblog Awards are sleaze merchants who want to run yet another “convention” in Vegas — a convention that looks eerily similar to the annual Adult Xpo that AVN puts on, up to and including the “awards” show at the end.
And has anyone complained, or raised the issue? Not that I’ve seen.
[* OK, I'm showing you how easy it is to jump to conclusions without evidence. I can tell you that the blogspot has existed since January. Who knows how popular it is? The point is that while we can question a situation, prima facie, we need to be careful about translating suspicions into facts. What we suspect and what we know will ALWAYS be slightly at variance, no matter how good we are.]
Sadly, much as I love “Sadly, No!” the same weird pattern holds for their web award as well. (49.6% of all votes cast, when the voting earlier in the week was much more balanced.)
Weird overvoting also occurs in these categories:
- Best Individual Blogger (54.1% to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit)
- Best Comic Strip (this one is closer, but still, xkcd got 36.8% of the vote)
- Best Online Community (Fark gets EXACTLY 50% of the vote!)
- Best Political Coverage (Real Clear Politics 52.8%)
Interestingly, the winner for “Best Technology Blog” hasn’t been determined:
RESULTS ARE NOT FINAL FOR THIS POLL! This poll is still being checked for excessive voting from individual machines. If excess voting is found it will be noted and the votes will be removed. The winner should be announced Monday.
Why? Two blogs have nearly ALL the votes! 44.2% and 44.7% with the other 8 blogs splitting the miserly remainder.
If you will compare the vote totals above with the other votes, like best conservative and best liberal, and best celebrity blogs, you’ll see a more typical vote distribution.
I’ve been looking at voting statistics for as long as I can remember, and I haven’t ever seen numbers like this in a legitimate election. But we’ll never know, because any hint that the Weblog Awards are tainted will be conscientiously suppressed by blogworld — who are in this to make money off of yet another bogus trade show, using the same booths and models that the used auto parts association trade show did last week. What happens in Vegas, in this case, OUGHT to have stayed in Vegas.
But, let’s assume for a moment that the “Best Blog” votes are correct.
The best blog is a living repudiation of what blogging is all about. It isn’t about thought, it isn’t about thinking or analysis, or reportage or about argument, propaganda or just Malkinesque HATESCREAM.
How depressing this must be for the phony Captain, “Special” Ed, who flew out there to flog his product and bask in the baselisk glow of his blogotry.
There is, ultimately, something profoundly depressing about a mindless, shite site like PostSecret showing up as “best blog” — a repudiation of human thought and expression (whether as ignoble as Malkin or as ennobled as Raw Story) that beggars the imagination.
Or, which explains why Rupert Murdoch is flying in private jets, rather than cleaning out septic tanks for a living. “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby,” said H.L. Mencken, that bitter cynic.
“Awards” were originally handed out to recognize ‘excellence.’ Now, they’re just marketing tools, pure and simple, and who CARES if the biggest awards were the result of hacking? The banners will be displayed for years on the websites in question (and I mean that literally) and Blogworld will get free advertising, and no one will be the wiser. Who cares, right?
This wasn’t about blogging. No: it’s about cheating at worst, peeping at best. It’s about a mindless, automatic system as moronic (but significantly less interesting) as RateMyRack!
Which, if the voice of the people is the voice of Ghod (vox populi, vox dei), is ACTUALLY the best blog out there.
Courage.
8 Comments
11 November 2007 at 8:58 am
Excellent conspiracy theory. Though next time I would include the Freemasons.
You are right that no one’s ever heard of PostSecret–unless you count the Bloggies, which named it Weblog of the Year, but who ever heard of them?
http://2007.bloggies.com
Although I think the Illuminati may have had something to do with PostSecret’s url change, Wikipedia has a different theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostSecret
The mysterious uptick in Sadly, No’s votes may have been the work of the Trilateral Commission, or it may have had something to do with this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×2203577
Glenn Reynolds’ votes I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that his is one of the most trafficked blogs on the Internet. Same with Fark.
This certainly doesn’t solve the mystery behind xkcd’s upsurge:
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/seriously-peopl.html
Maybe we should call Erich Von Daniken.
11 November 2007 at 9:19 pm
Well, Jon, you’d carry a lot more credibility IF you’d bothered to read the entire post.
My final point was not at all dependent on whether or not the votes had been hacked.
My FIRST points were merely noting that, if you looked at the various voting patterns, they normally fall into a predictable, if random pattern. One or two blogs will receive a significant number of votes, and several will receive none whatsoever.
Figure ONE is typical.
But then again, when you have such a huge disparity — e.g. of 55,000+ votes cast (which is about double the votes cast in any other category) and almost half of those votes for one blog, significantly distancing itself from all other blogs — well, you ought to ask questions.
But asking questions and making final determinations are quite different functions, and are carefully distinguished in a piece it seems you didn’t quite read.
So who’s jumping to conclusions now?
13 November 2007 at 3:02 am
Whoever heard of Google or Wikipedia, which have only been in existence since you noticed them? So how could you have looked up PostSecret in Google or Wikipedia if they didn’t exist when you wrote your piece?
13 November 2007 at 8:19 am
You STILL need to read the whole post, dude. You might have missed THIS paragraph:
[* OK, I’m showing you how easy it is to jump to conclusions without evidence. I can tell you that the blogspot has existed since January. Who knows how popular it is? The point is that while we can question a situation, prima facie, we need to be careful about translating suspicions into facts. What we suspect and what we know will ALWAYS be slightly at variance, no matter how good we are.]
Whoops!
13 November 2007 at 8:51 am
Are you part of a shady international conspiracy to take over the world and force everyone to worship your blog as the Best Blog, the One True Blog? I’m not making any accusations; I’m just asking questions. That’s entirely different.
I’m still trying to read your entire post but I just can’t get past your intriguing questions, which are not accusations at all.
13 November 2007 at 9:30 am
Yo! Jon!
Sarcasm is most effective when it’s not based on a clueless misreading of the text in question.
The “conspiracy” accusation is, of course, based on the presumption that conspiracies never take place, which, of course, means that Bush was legitimately elected twice. Right?
So, I guess you need to get back to your day job ghosting for Bill O’Reilly. I won’t keep you.
13 November 2007 at 11:19 am
Well, now we can agree on something. Clueless misreading is indeed a big problem.
13 November 2007 at 1:06 pm
Dear Mr. Swift:
If you would care to engage in the lost art of rational debate, I would be happy to engage you.
But, if you are simply going to snipe when you haven’t managed to bring up a single cogent argument, I am afraid that this thread will have to cease.
You maintain that I am a “conspiracy” theorist. I maintain — as at the beginning — that on the face of it, the voting figures in specific elections look highly suspicious.
You provide “counter” evidence that is merely your conjecture with a heaping dollop of snide on the side. But you don’t provide evidence; merely your “reasoning.” That’s not “proof.” It is merely counter-opinion.
You seem to entirely miss my final point about the nature of blogging itself, and there is no response.
You offer snide commentary thereafter without once addressing an issue, offering evidence, or, increasingly, logical analysis.
I’m on your side. While you might be USED to arguing with a Malkin or a Faux Nooz clone, this is not that sort of debate.
I genuinely think that the results are skewed, and it is in BlogSalesWorld’s vested interest to pretend that this is all on the up and up.
Two examples: First, the “technology blogs” which I cite, which are suspected of being hacked.
Secondly, and this is NEW, the “science” blogs which became a crazy ideological battle between global warming deniers and an actual physicist, which was declared “a tie” to smooth over ruffled feathers and sweep controversy under the rug.
Besides, who needs a “conspiracy” to hack an online voting system? (Presuming that “conspiracy” was, prima facie, an indictment, and, therefore, an argument, which it is not.)
Hacking is hacking, and your initial argument that Postsecret had won a “bloggie” merely begs the question, since the methodology for voting is nearly exactly the same as the Weblog awards.
There is no lock built by the mind of man that cannot be picked; there is no site that cannot be hacked. Sorry.
Add the “commercial” value to the author of winning “best blog” for what is, in essence, a NON blog, and you have a motive.
Unless the question is asked and publicly proven or disproven, nothing will be learned. This seems to bother you, sir. Why?
The ball is in your court. Are you capable of civil debate? Or did you merely steal the Good Doctor Swift’s name without bothering with any of his erudition?
“Strenuum pro virili Libertatis Vindicatorem”
Comments are closed.