I’d like to thank (profusely and repeatedly) everyone who has been coming to check out my blog via the College Blogging Scholarship site. Whether you’re deciding to vote for me or not, I hope you’ll keep coming back.
First, the bad news. We all know how this goes: the finalists are announced, and they all go ask all their friends and associates to vote for them, and to pass on the message to go vote for them. When someone, given the “Go vote for Sean” (or whoever) message, lands on the voting page, they’re confronted by a list of 19 other blogs besides the one they went there to vote for. How many of them REALLY think “Gosh, I should probably check out all of the other blogs to see which one really deserves my vote!”. The vast majority, I’m sure we all realize, just click on whoever they came to vote for and leave. Obviously whoever has the largest network of affiliated bloggers to send out repeated “vote for my buddy” posts every day has a huge advantage. Checking my server logs, I see that this is definitely true. (I’m lookin’ at YOU, scienceblogs.com! Unfair? No, actually, not at all. Jealous? You bet your sweet bippy I’m jealous!)
Since the start of the competition, I’ve gotten a total of 465 unique visits referred from the scholarship finalists announcement page. At present, there are 19,740 votes that have been cast – so less than 2.5% of the voters have bothered to check out the other blogs.
Now, the good news: This is actually much higher than I would have guessed. Given the comparative obscurity of my blog (at the moment), the fact that more than one in fifty voters have at least looked over the first page of my blog makes me very happy. So, again, thanks, and I hope you’ll keep coming back.
In other news, Josh Charles of “[website]$sudo life” suggests that my post suggesting a “War on Science” could be a good thing for science would make a good basis for an entertaining spoof documentary. I’m kind of liking that idea…
Enough of that for now, though. I’ll be getting back to my science communication, amateur science, and microbiology roots in the next few posts. Stay tuned…
Now now, surely you can’t begrudge SB for helping one of their own? 😉 Not that I’m winning anyway… And whats a bippy?!
Oh, no, no begrudgement, just honest, old-fashioned envy 🙂
“Non-traditional student” or not, I’m not really as old as this makes me sound but:
Back in the late 1960’s, there was a comedy show called “Laugh-In”. “You bet your bippy” was one of their taglines (No, they never did explain exactly what a “bippy” was…). The “bonus information” that pops up when you hover over or click “bippy” in the post above was another one of their taglines…
I wouldn’t write yourself off yet – you’ve left the current third-place holder far behind by 100%, and although you’re still behind the 1st-place holder, your rate-of-vote-increase-function’s derivative is higher than theirs, so with two weeks yet to go you may yet win it.
That’s assuming I don’t find some way to pull a whole rabbit-warren of votes out of my metaphorical hat by then, of course. I may still yet zoom up from behind and amaze everyone by winning, though just getting up into the third or second tier of votes is probably a more realistic goal (which I’d categorize as, right now, those blogs averaging around 20 votes/day and those averaging around 75-150 votes/day, respectively).