Wow. Our very own Shelly Batts is a finalist in competition for a blog scholarship. Help out a promising young neuroscientist and Vote Shelly!
It is also an interesting turn to make blog popularity, as measured by a poll, the deciding factor in awarding a fairly substantial sum of money. I hope they've made the voting fairly secure.
Dang, I've also been contacted by one of the other nominees—you should actually look over the field of candidates and make an informed decision about which one you favor. Vote for the best blogger!
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More secure than, say, the poll deciding where Alex Doonesbury should go to college.
Seldom have I been more proud of my alma mater and everything it represents. . . .
Thank you so much PZ!
Well, I voted for Shelly - as much because she is the only blogger on the list that I read. Having said that, I think it's an idiotic way of deciding who should get the money - it would be more appropriate to grant it on merit, instead of votes.
Argh. Sorry about misspelling your first name Shelley, and what's worse, I see that PZ did it as well - since both PZ and I have names that people have a hard time spelling correctly, we should presumably be extra aware of not making such mistakes
Who is going to beat the hordes of Paul Stamatiou's readers?
Should one know Paul Stamatiou?
He is a techi blogger on Top 100 Technorati list for ages now. He probably gets five grand via blogads in a month.
No problem, as long as they spell it right on the check. :)
And, yeah, it doesn't look to be a fair fight. More like a traffic contest than one based on content.
Ah. I avoid tech blogs like the plague - unless they answer a specific problem I have. I get enough tech through my work, to not wanting to read about it when I off work.
Normally they are not really very technical anyway - they are just geektalk like Slashdot.
There should probably have been some thing about a maximum earning per month from the blog. Or requiring a description of what the scholarship money will be used for.
Your hope that they´re making the voting fairly secure is probably sadly misplaced. They seem to use a fairly simple method, easily outmanouvred. At least it was no problem getting to the voting page again even after I had voted.
So I´m a bit skeptical about the method.
She's a fellow parrot owner, that's all I need to give her my vote! (and yes her blog is good too)
It might simply be a matter of discarding votes from the same IP, which creates a different kind of problem. Oh, well.
Cyberspace Rendezvous looks like a pretty good blog as well. Always nice to expand one's reading habits.
Now another one got the DailyKos readers over to vote - this is a War! Vote science bloggers, vote early, vote often...(as long as you do the legal thing, i.e., no spamming etc.)...
Oh crap. We can't win against DailyKos......
It might simply be a matter of discarding votes from the same IP, which creates a different kind of problem. Oh, well.
Well, they of course could and probably will discard votes using the same IP address. Which is also not difficult to circumvent.
I dunno. I think they should have gone with email confirmation. You want to vote? Tell us your email address (it won´t be used for anything else and will be deleted after the competition). We´ll send you an automated email back. Click on the link in the email to confirm your vote. Only then will it get counted.
Now lot´s of people do have more than one email account, granted. But it would still be a bit more difficult to vote multiple times.
I sincerely hope nothing of this happens. But it is the Internet where "we" readers are anonymous. The temptation is surely there. Especially since it doesn´t cost "us" anything while helping a favourite science blogger getting some real money.
Should I mention that I personally only voted once? I was simply curious if it were possible to vote more than once.
I'm glad to be competing against Shelley & other students who blog about science, but what's with the tech stuff?! I thought this was a student science blogger thing? Or is this any student from any field?
Speaking of technical difficulties, what's with the bogus "500 Server" errors on comments? I call them bogus because the comment does go through despite the error. (I duped my post the first time, but learned my lesson by the second time it happened.) I see Shelley's post is duped -- did she get hit by the same thing?