A pointless poll in a new medium

Why are #religion and #bacon separate? Aren't pork products a form of worship?

Amen.

Why is an American Idol contestant beating a real doctor in a "health" poll? They should remove him until he debuts a song about your upper and/or lower ganglia.

So nominate yourself for a Shorty in the category #godofbacon, and all will be resolved.

It's a pointless poll on twitter. Of course an American Idol contestant would be a perfect nominee over a doctor.

This is not reality, you know.

Voted. More curious as to why the #Education leaders are all bible based instead of real teachers. Such a sad state of affairs in US these days.

All the more reason why I am thankful that I never had kids.

Yet another reason why I remain Twitter-free.

Funny you should mention this, I was going to suggest that you throw your weight behind the #journalist category, as it is currently being dominated by a Daniel Razon, who is some kind of Christian journalist, with a lovely bible verse as his description. I would recommend Rachel Maddow or Jeremy Scahill, but really, anybody else would do. I think a full on pharyngulation is necessary, given Razon's lead.

http://shortyawards.com/category/journalist

Can I win the #steampunk category -- Please.

"I nominate @MosquitoEater for a Shorty Award in #steampunk because his unpublished novel REALLY needs to be published"

DrRachie has now pulled ahead of David Archuleta in the health category. If you told me even a week ago I'd be writing that sentence, I would have suggested you seek counselling. Excuse me while my head explodes...

"Pointless Twitter poll" seems like a redundant phrase. Tweets are for birdbrains.

I checked out the education category. Creationist "Brother Eli Soriano" is actually placed 1st AND second right now. I checked out his site, and read his article on scientific proof that man was created from a handful of dust. Is it possible for one's head to explode twice in one day?

This must be corrected...

11:46 a.m. Eastern time, and Mercola is about to fall behind Dr. Rachel in the poll. It's really fun to watch this in action. Also it appears that the Pharynguloid horde does not Twitter, because this is going much slower than most polls.

PZ has like 10,000 twitter followers, so some of them must use it.

My tweet was ... I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because the squid overlord told me to

Another pointless poll in Spain about if crosses must be conserved in Spanish school. Fundies are winning hand down now. Pharyngulate it!

http://www.elpais.com/encuestas/encuesta.html?id=13787

The right answer is "No", of course :-)

The Spain poll looks hard to pharyngulate -- doesn't it have 83,000+ responses?

Never seen any point with Twatter.

Unless you're some sort of international (wo)man of mystery your life is, truth be told, epically dull except to your nearest & dearest. Maybe.

And Dr. Rachel has now passed Mercola for 2nd place. Keep up the good work.

I'm the single vote for #squid. I posted a few weeks back in one of the never-ending comment threads, hoping other Phargynutwits would help me in my lonely crusade, but nobody seemed to bite at the time.

Oh, wait, I think we're reading the Shorty site wrong. There's ONE contender for Squid, not one vote. You actually have a lot of votes, now that I'm reading the page again. (Although you can still see that my vote was first on Jan 8th.)

http://shortyawards.com/pzmyers/2

it never fails, every time someone mentions Twitter there the usual tired comments denigrating it. They're usually by people that have no clue at all about it and usually around 140 characters. (Commenting on a specific blog post is so superior to commenting in general on Twitter.)

Here's what I use Twitter for: I follow prominent atheists or atheist sites. I follow science related sites and people. I also follow sites and people in my profession. All usually post links to news or articles I can use. I also follow friends who mostly post links to things of common interest and the musicians I like so I know what they're doing. Like any tool, it is how you use it that's important. But keep cluelessly thinking it's all about people tweeting what they ate for lunch. That never gets old, it just keeps getting funnier and funnier.

Also Scalzi really deserves the #bacon. He has the Canonical Bacon Page on his site, and is famous for Bacon Cat.

@wwew: Oh, it'S like everything mildly popular. I mean, replace Twitter with facebook or (long ago) myspace or ( long long long long ago ) Livejournal and you'll have someone going "BAH! THIS FAD'S TERRRRRRRRIBBLEEE"

I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because of her work on The Skeptic Zone podcast advocating good medical practice.

Seriously, if you don't subscribe to The Skeptic Zone, please do so. Excellent podcast

Dr. Quackenranger's voters really do say it all don't they?

"I nominate @HealthRanger for a Shorty Award in #health because...he tells me stuff other people won't."
(Are you curious why your REAL doctor isn't an anti-vac quack?)

"I nominate @HealthRanger for a Shorty Award in #health because...of the excellent way this news presented and delivered"
(Not the CONTENT, just the pretty package)

"I nominate @HealthRanger for a Shorty Award in #health because...he tells you the things that THEY do not want you to k..."
(THEY LIVE!)

And the most popular nomiation speach is...

"I nominate @HealthRanger for a Shorty Award in #health because... "
(because hundreds of people can't think of a good reason)

Bacon votes should go to @simonpainter

He did bring us bacon smoothie:

http://www.youtube.com/simonpainter#p/u/4/Xnvxw7x25qk

Bah, SimonPainter is a neophyte to Scalzi in the bacon departmnet. A really bacon-come-lately. That says October 2009. Scalzi has been bringing home the bacon since 2006.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/the-canonical-bacon-page/

http://baconcat.com/

(Scalzi's Law even states that internet conversations will involve bacon at some point and that those conversations will be forwarded to Scalzi.)

http://jdack.livejournal.com/430103.html

Pointless or not, it's woo vs science, @HealthRanger 572 vs @DrRachie 395- and PZ has >10,000 followers on Twitter. This should be a rout, but ~9700 PZ followers haven't pulled their finger out yet.

Dr Rachie is running at #2, and I'm still pushing hard for more votes, people. Come on, get in here NAOW!

We'll need a decent margin over @healthranger to maintain a lead, so more pharyngulites would be good.

(@drunkenmadman here btw)

Well I think the Shorty Awards, having been on this field for quite a couple of years, understood that first and foremost, this is a user-powered competition because winners will be declared based on the number of votes.

So to sort things out, I think there are few safety nets that the body provides. Among there are -

1. If you are the nominated personality, you must claim that via your Twitter account.

2. This is just the elimination round. The Academy will decide who will be included in its top five or six nominees. From there, the people can then decide who really should be it.

So, as of the moment, I guess there is nothing much to worry about this award-giving event.

Hey guys,

While you're voting in the Shortys, may I suggest the following?

http://shortyawards.com/Ubisoft

More like this! Tell Ubisoft you won't buy their games while they pay anti-vaccine menace Jenny McCarthy for endorsements! Vote @Ubisoft in #evil because of @JennyFromMTV!

Also vote: @nocompulsoryvac in #quacks (Twitter presence of the Australian Vaccination Network and Meryl Dorey, more antivax nasties.

And if you could spare a nod in #humor for @HappySinger, I'd be grateful...

@DrRachie is still about 150 votes from the top spot. This could be a phailed pharyngulation if we aren't careful.

OK folks, we've lost Massachusetts, lets not lose this one. This may not seem important, but do we really want anti-vaccine and religious nuts to look like they've whipped us, especially when we've declared a pharyngulation? Get out there and vote for Dr. Rachael. And on journalism maybe Rachel Maddow is too political for you, can we find a journalist we can all agree to support to beat this Daniel Razon guy?

Less than a hundred votes to go in order to get Rachael Dunlop to #1 slot. Dunlop's votes are growing quicker than HealthRanger's. C'mon Pharyngulites...

And Dr. Rachael has taken the lead! But it's still close, lets make this a blowout!

@pixelfish Well, technically, other people have been bringing sclazi the bacon, as opposed to him bringing home the bacon himself.

Bacon smoothie + Bacon ice cream + Frequent experimentation with bacon salt > Bacon Cat

(Have travelled around Africa with Simon though, I am, I quite freely admit, biased too. http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk/ )

About a 100 vote lead at this point, but woo-meister picked up quite a few votes today as well and could take the lead back. Anyone know if it is one voter per account or one per account per day?

I am now entirely convinced that the Pharynguloid horde cheats to win online polls. 45,000 no votes on a poll on the afterlife in a day, but two days later after not just PZ, but a number of skeptic bloggers mentioning it, only 972 votes on Twitter for Dr. Rachael. This with over 10,000 accounts following PZ on Twitter.

Either we cheat on simple polls or we don't mind looking like fools when we can't win a Twitter poll.

One of the peculiarities (or sensible arrangements) of that twitter poll is that they filter out newbies. That is, if you only registered with twitter to vote on a poll and haven't otherwise used the medium at all, they'll toss your vote out. That means, unfortunately, that only a small subset of readers here were able to submit valid votes.

Update on this Shorty Award thing...

Based on this post, Orac's urgings and other campaigning on Twitter, we boosted @DrRachie up above 1,000 legitimate votes from skeptics and science lovers. Meanwhile Mike Adams' people started getting desperate, creating new Twitter accounts just to vote. I and others easily found many of these accounts, most have no followers and only one tweet - the vote for Adams.

Several of us including myself and Phil Plait, Travis Roy and myself emailed the organizers to point out these shenanigans. We also posted publicly on Twitter that we were doing this. Adams followers responded by using the sock puppets to cast votes for DrRachie and others in spitefully named categories.

Today the Shorty Awards people responded to our emails and told us they were looking into the allegations of ballot stuffing. Just a few hours later, they took decisive action.

Not only is Mike Adams no longer in the top 5, but he is now not visible on the site at all. His vote page (http://shortyawards.com/HealthRanger) now throws a 404 error. So apparently he is out of the running for any award.

Well done.

Dr. Rachie now has a commanding lead over the #2 spot, but since only the top 5 spots proceed to the next stage of judging, and #2 is woo-meister Joe Mercola, perhaps we should some other deserving health Twitterers to similarly boost up into the top 5.

...and exactly as one would expect, Mike Adams has gone ballistic, accusing the Shorty Awards of rampant fraud:

http://www.naturalnews.com/028006_Shorty_Awards_vote_fraud.html

...and threatening the founders with a lawsuit:

http://twitter.com/HealthRanger/status/8091367980

The man is delusional. Most of what he accuses the opposition of doing in that NaturalNews post is exactly what his supporters were doing. As for there being no evidence of any fraud, all of the votes are public posts on Twitter. We posted the names of just a handful of the fraudulent accounts here:

http://twitter.com/krelnik/status/7947687459
http://twitter.com/krelnik/status/7992254370
http://twitter.com/TheMadSkeptic/status/7994912295

Anyone can do a simple Twitter search at search.twitter.com with the search term "#health @HealthRanger" and see all the votes he received.