Friday, January 18, 2008

Our annual Top 20 Under 40 feature published today, and I have to say that I am shocked and outraged to find that I wasn’t even nominated. Next year I’m going for top honours – make it happen people. If you happened to miss the feature in today’s Tribune, you can find the bios of the winners here. Congratulations to the award recipients.

The other day I received two interesting emails on the same topic. I’ll quote the first of them below:

Your Internet website poll is boloney. Everytime I go to your website I can vote in your poll. I can and did vote multiple times. Not an accurate way of running a poll. Someone should “fix” the ability of people to vote as many times that they want or do away with it. Just being honest. Kevin
He raises an interesting point — however, our polls are not designed to be a scientifically accurate method of gauging public opinion. They are just for fun.

Yes, there are ways to circumvent the system and vote multiple times on the same poll. You can’t, however, as Kevin suggests, simply revisit the page and vote again. At least not without messing around with some browser settings, the details of which I’m not going to go into. I am guessing that Kevin is using Firefox as his browser, which means that while technically he can vote as many times as he wants by revisiting the website, only his first vote will actually be counted.

The second email I got on this topic was forwarded to me by one of our editorial staff. It seems that someone called Kevin (this may or may not be the same Kevin) from an off-road enthusiast Web site was soliciting members of that site to vote in our poll on the Oceano Dunes. The email came from a reader who was concerned that the results of our poll did not reflect the opinions of local residents.

I can appreciate the concern of the reader.

As a county paper, we primarily serve residents of the county. On the web, however, we have a wider reach, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing as it reflects the interests of those who visit or have ties here. Plus, Kevin's solicitation of new users to our site gave us more visitors, which we’ll never argue with.

The other side is always welcome to marshal its supporters to vote in response. We welcome the site traffic.

So thanks for the traffic Kevin.

5 comments:

SLORider said...

>>So thanks for the traffic Kevin.

Hey, you're welcome! Not the same Kevin, by the way.

Funny thing is, this crowd goes wild to bring every one of their friends to a Board of Supervisor's meeting, sacking everyone with endless off-topic comment and wasting hoards of staff time with baseless appeals... but they cry foul when we invite our friends to participate in a poll?

Even the NAY numbers on this poll are much higher than usual--obviously they are soliciting votes as well. But if they can't compete, maybe they are having trouble facing that they are in the extreme minority and that most believe our family-oriented State Park should remain that, and not closed for enjoyment!

-Kevin

SLORider said...

I also forgot to mention that Oceano Dunes is a STATE PARK and is not limited to local users. A few greedy locals should not be able to shut out enjoyment by the rest of the state. All state residents hold equal entitlement to our state park as county residents do.

JR said...

Danny: I'll nominate you next year! Don't you worry!

-Jen R.

Kristin said...

It seems funny that someone feels the need to specify that they are being truthful ("Just being honest"), especially when they are talking about how to cheat an online poll. But maybe that's just my sense of humor...

Anonymous said...

Thanking slorider Kevin for traffic is so apropo. Funny.

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