Tech Daily Dose: Analysis: FishbowlDC Contest Plagued By Bots? http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2007/08/analysis-fishbowldc-contest-pl.php?rss=1 en Copyright 2010 Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:04:39 GMT http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Analysis: FishbowlDC Contest Plagued By Bots? 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.

]]> http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2007/08/analysis-fishbowldc-contest-pl.php?rss=1 http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2007/08/analysis-fishbowldc-contest-pl.php?rss=1 Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:04:39 GMT