Saturday, November 10, 2007

Voting Irregularities in Weblog Awards 2007? Engadget and Gizmodo Duke it Out

Voting is now closed for the Best Technology Blog, but there is a potential vote rigging controversy afoot. The site currently states:

"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."

Top gadget blogs Engadget and Gizmodo dominated the voting - and both are neck and neck, with 44.7% and 44.2% of the votes respectively. [let's not mention where R/WW ended up!]. Both of the big gadget blogs heavily promoted the contest to their readers. During the week I noticed Engadget take an early lead - and up till a couple of days ago when I last checked, Engadget held a reasonable lead over Gizmodo. But both sites have gotten a lot of fast votes over the past few days. Perhaps taking their fierce rivalry a bit too far?

Note that users were allowed to cast 1 vote every 24 hours, which was determined by IP address. But most web techies know how easy it is to manipulate ip address voting. So we'll see how the "excessive voting" investigation goes!

p.s. I wonder if this will be covered by Valleywag? ;-)

Top image courtesy of CNNMoney.com (linked above)

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