Friday, February 10, 2012

Analysis: FishbowlDC Contest Plagued By Bots?

August 22, 2007

Salon.com's Machinist blog follows up on the weeks-old controversy surrounding FishbowlDC's annual "Hottest Media Types" contest. The author writes about how the election was rigged and how "trying to find the hottest reporter in the nation's capital is like trying to elect a president in Ukraine… Don't expect fairness."

Scruffy arts writer Kriston Capps and his housemate and friend Catherine Andrews, an editor at Washingtonian.com, both took home first place in the "off-air" category. The blog reveals that they "acknowledge that they won only because their online friends… built software bots that voted thousands of times for each of them."

"What's surprising is not that anyone cheated -- online polls are about as trustworthy as Soviet Bloc elections -- but how brazen, and how easy, the cheating was," the blog explains. Read the full post here. Also, Capps responds here.

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Juliana Gruenwald has been covering tech and telecom issues for more than a decade for National Journal, Interactive Week, BNA and Congressional Quarterly. This is her second stint with National Journal. She was recruited by NJ in 1998 to help launch its first tech policy publication, Technology Daily. She left in 2000 to cover international tech and telecom issues for Ziff Davis Media's Interactive Week magazine. She started her career at United Press International as the wire service's first Helen Thomas Intern. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota. A Minneapolis native, she misses the lakes but not the cold.


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