Blogovăţ 2010
Dear friends, colleagues, acquaintances and everyone else who reads the articles that I write and publish here,
I would like to thank you all who supported me and voted for my blog in the Moldovan blog contest “Blogovat 2010″, however, I was totally disappointed to find out that due to unknown reasons the organizers have disqualified my blog from the contest.
Up to this moment I have received no written explanation from the organizers of the contest as to why this kind of preferential treatment was applied to my blog. The only source of information was rumors that I have heard here and there in the last couple of days, according to which the reason my blog was disqualified was “fraud in the voting process” or “an excessive number of votes”.
a) The accusation of forging the results is offending. I consider my blog to be of a high quality – both in terms of topic, original content as well as in terms of visual concept, which in my opinion made the blog petreculeac.wordpress.com a strong candidate, with high chances of being among the top nominees at least in one of the categories it was registered in, this making futile any attempt from my part to try and influence in any way the voting process.
b) The second rumored “reason” for disqualification is ludicrous: who and on what grounds has the authority to decide what is “too many votes”? Is 50 a normal number of votes? Then most of the winners of this year have to be disqualified too since they have exceeded the average number of votes other contestants received.
Since the voting process of this contest wasn’t entirely transparent, and my communication with the organizers is being ignored so far, I am in the situation of being obliged to make my own hypothesis in order to figure out what might be the reason for the disqualification of my blog from the Moldovan blog contest Blogovat-2010.
1. Provincialism? Is the Moldovan blog contest a provincial event with provincial mentality and outcomes, making it impossible for a blog to participate if it has more that N number of votes coming from readers or friends, because this may be classified as “an excessive number of votes”?
2. Sabotage? I do not exclude the possibility that the blog was deliberately sabotaged for whatever reason (possibly in order to eliminate a rival contestant that was endangering the victory of a pre-decided winner). If this is the case, then it might be the fault of the organizers who either pulled up this performance themselves, or failed to ensure the security of the voting process in order to prevent the sabotage of one or another contestant.
It is sad to write these lines both because this is a regrettable episode in this year blog competition, which pointed out to some good, qualitative blogs that won some top places in the same time leaving behind other blogs with much higher number of votes. In the same time it is sad to see how empty, yet provincially glamorous blogs get propelled among winners through the use of various handy techniques.
From my part, I would like to say thank you to all those who read my articles and sorry that your votes got lost in vain.
Sincerely yours,
Petru Culeac
