straightforward expect castor rewind despatch credit http://www.available-credit-report.com/ …

I have just asked all our ops (who are all very active in the channel and are trying very hard to make it a useful resource for designers and developers) and not one of them recognises you, further I can only find a few instances of you even being in the channel in our logs, which is why I took such offence.

Personally I believe your actions to be little better than spamming by email - which I think we can all agree would be out of order.

Running a channel that accepts all-comers from newbies to hardened design professionals is already a tricky business, we fight a constant battle against spam and misuse, while trying to juggle educating new users and keeping the interest of more advanced users.

This is one of the few times where it’s possible to make someone misusing our community responsible for their actions, so I apologise if this somewhat personal attack seems petty.

Good afternoon

I do realize the difference between South by Southwest Music and the Interactive part.

To me anyway both are based on a spirit of discovery.

My main reason to come to such an event is to get inspired, explore new ideas and meet new and interesting people.

Serge
http://www.sergetheconcierge.typepad.com

Lena: Example

Serge: Example

Andrew: Example

Tim: Example - Example 2

Cris: Example

Ryan: Example

All I’m aying is that everyone asked for votes OUTSIDE of TechCrunch.

“…you want to influence the social rankings of a system by telling people to choose a particular voting option and not letting them choose and vote on each candiate’s merits.”

See the above links.

I think the point (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) of this friendly competition was to see was could garner the most support in a short amount of time to send them to SXSW. I for one, want to go bad enough that I campaigned every day, 5-6 times a day. Asking every avenue of the ’social web’ that I had available to me. Blogs, IRC, Myspace, Digg, Xanga, E-mail, Co-workers, Family, Friends in a coffee shops, Facebook, and Stylegala.

In my view I most definitely would say you are wrong here. I don’t believe Mike asked the whole of the internet to come and pick someone. He asked his readers who value his site here to vote on there choice of who they thought should get the ticket. The loyal readers of this site would be the people with a balanced view of reading each of the entries as Mike linked to above and making an informed decision on who we thought was the best suited candidate from the information provided. Mike’s audience includes some of the most influential and creative people in the internet world and not just the ‘Web 2.0’ field. Your anonymous voters in whatever volume I would say have never been here previous to this and I doubt would ever come back to read the ‘Crunch Network’. Most people who read this site I would suggest took the time to read the entry from each of the candidates. Your MySpace site and a comment here from another myspace user were “How do I vote for Ryan, I cannot see his name there”, that question is answered by the single line of text above the ‘dpoll’. That is not an informed or fair vote IMHO.

If you were to post an article on Digg (Not related to this competition) and then used all of the social avenues you had to raise the amount of Digg’s on your entry just to get it to the homepage I think you would find the Digg audience would not be very happy with someone trying to manipulate the system like that. People of late have spoken of the ‘Digg mob mentality’, your process is worse than that scenario IMHO.

I think and we would all understand that some family and friends coming by and dropping in a few votes for you is great and no doubt welcome (even family bribes would be fine). I think when tactics like what you have taken simply shows ‘You don’t get it’ and you want to influence the social rankings of a system by telling people to choose a particular voting option and not letting them choose and vote on each candiate’s merits. One of the main purposes of what is being created with web 2.0 is user choice and not underhand tactics similar to spam to distort the results.

I must say if this was an open slather grab everything and get as many votes from any place you can think of you would be a worthy winner. You are very enthusiastic and not at all a bad web designer and you will be an even greater asset to the industry after you leave school.

I wish you the best in your future endeavours.

Regards,

CO

Tell me exactly what I did that makes you object? Was is it the campaigning for votes? I didn’t realize that was something I wasn’t allowed to do. Was it asking them to vote twice? I don’t think that is a ‘flaw’ or an ‘exploit’ by any means. I think that is a normal part of the dPolls system. They could have easily kept a list of the IPs that voted until the poll was closed and not allowed them to vote again, but they didn’t.

I think the point (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) of this friendly competition was to see was could garner the most support in a short amount of time to send them to SXSW. I for one, want to go bad enough that I campaigned every day, 5-6 times a day. Asking every avenue of the ’social web’ that I had available to me. Blogs, IRC, Myspace, Digg, Xanga, E-mail, Co-workers, Family, Friends in a coffee shops, Facebook, and Stylegala.

Not once did I think what I was doing or asking of my friends was unethical. I’m sorry if you feel that way, I truly am.

Ryan

1/13/2006 5:52:00 AM

This is it, tonight at midnight the voting stops and winner announced. Right now I am in the lead, but not by much. If you already voted YOU CAN VOTE AGAIN! Once per day, so go back and hit it up, one last time!

Thank you so much for supporting me.

You speak of only asking some friends in an EFNet IRC channel, though from your site on myspace.com you have many comments from people who told you they voted twice and now you are asking everyone to vote twice. I don’t think that is very fair on your behalf.

Vote twice comment
Ryan’s myspace.com

Now, I will apologize if he took offense to my response (or lack thereof) to his flame. So for that, I’m sorry.

Additionally, his response to the concern brought forth by Barry of efnet just struck me as…unprofessional. “Calm down, everything is going to be ‘okay’.” This strikes me as something close to rude, or at the least, dismissive.

Michael, I apologize for being so negative and I don’t mean to start any kind of significant flaming, but maybe Ryan could’ve won a few more votes with an apology instead of a dismissal?