Microsoft Office Winter Games Contest Semi-Finals Report

I came, I blogged, I tweeted, I e-mailed, I Facebooked (no, that's not a real verb although people are using it way too much these days) and put up requests on a range of lists and other sites for the past 13 days in an attempt to win two coveted trips to blog at the Olympics and CES plus a brand new laptop. (Here's more info on the contest.) Voting ceased at midnight Pacific time, and to my knowledge, this is the last of the voting for this contest.

Many people have been asking what happens next. To answer the question on whether I have any idea where I stand regarding votes, no - not yet. I hope they will give us totals. The link I created near the end of the second day at bit.ly provided statistics and I was able to see how many clicks I received through that link. Some of the data was skewed, but I think I generated approximately 3000 clicks to the contest website. That does not necessarily mean I received 3000 votes, however, due to random site visitors, site errors, visitors who did not wish to share their e-mail addresses, and visitors who voted for someone else. And it does not give any sense of what the other semi-finalists produced in terms of clicks or votes. Still, it was a good learning experience for me to track everything.

I've been told that it will take a couple of weeks to tally votes, verify authenticity and inform the top three vote-getters who will be named as official finalists. Once the top three women finalists are identified, the judges will look at the vote totals, the overall quality of work on our blogs, our submitted essays and the social media outreach we did during the voting period. Then they will make their decision as to the grand prize winner, to be announced at the OfficeWinterGames.com site on January 7th.

So the best thing you can do for me at this point - if you're still willing! - is to visit my blog and write comments on my posts. I would love it if every figure skating post had some comments there for the judges to read.

Please visit and comment on my blog at BlogHer - http://www.blogher.com/blog/sarah-granger

Thank you all who voted, e-mailed and tweeted on my behalf.

Help Me Get to the Olympics - Vote!

Friends & faithful readers, I need your help!

I'll make it easy for you...

Go here: http://bit.ly/VoteSarah
Register once with e-mail. Vote for me every day through November 29th.

Tweet this:
I voted for Sarah in the #blogathlete @Office contest. Please help send her to the Olympics! http://bit.ly/VoteSarah #VoteSarah

Blast it anywhere else you can think of:
Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Ryze, Orkut, etc... oh yeah and that e-mail thing.

Be thanked:
THANK YOU!

...

Here's the full scoop:
I'm really excited to be one of 5 semi-finalists in a very cool contest to win a trip to the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada in February, but I need your help to win - starting today!

Microsoft Office is sponsoring one woman blogger to attend, and on top of that, the winner gets a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in January and a free laptop. I made it to the top five by submitting my blog about figure skating at BlogHer, the women bloggers' network, but I need help getting into the finals with public voting.

Voting started today and goes through November 29th. It requires a simple registration, then you can vote once a day every day through the 29th.

Click here to VOTE!

It just takes a few steps: Click on the tiny highlighted login text at the top of the page above the list of voters, and it will take you to a screen where you can enter your e-mail address and a password. Then after you're logged in, it will take you to back to the voting screen where you'll see my name at the bottom. Click on the "Vote for me!" button below my name and you're done. Until tomorrow. ;)

The top three vote-getters go to the final round where the judges then choose the winner.  My goal is to get so many votes that I blow the others out of the water, so the judges have a clear decision in the final round.

Each person only gets 13 votes - one per day. If you would like to be on my daily reminders list, please drop me a line after you register and vote. Everyone on the daily list will receive Olympic fun facts and I promise I'll stop emailing the list on the 30th. Otherwise, I'll email you every so often with reminders as the contest progresses.

One last favor: if you're willing, please tell any of your friends who you think might take a few minutes to sign up and vote for me as well.

Direct link again to register and vote: https://www.officewintergames.com/Vote.aspx

Thank you so very much for your help!

Recap of a busy week - politics, new media, gov 2.0 and more

Last week was a whirlwind on the local level... after Newsom dropped out of the CA governors' race, I wrote a piece about it that had a pretty good reception at The Huffington Post but was maimed by trolls at SFGate. Having seen this happen before for other writers, I reluctantly decided to remove all comments. I reviewed the problem with other blogger friends who confirmed it's a common problem for newspapers-turned-online publications.

I put up a detailed response at SFGate explaining the problem to readers and the community there and received a lot of letters via e-mail in support. The SFGate staff also were responsive as well, looking into what they can do with the system that will help solve their comment moderation problem. (IMO it shouldn't be that hard technically - they're using Moveable Type - it's more a matter of budgeting the staff time and having a smart plan in place.)

After spending way more time on that last week, I was able to shift gears back to tech, I finished an article about Twitter Lists for Digital Landing. I've been researching Twitter Lists since they first launched, and one of my lists of the Women in Politics & Tech group (WIPT) was put on the Change.org list of Ten Feminist Twitter Lists.

Saturday, I headed to CA Data Camp where I caught up with local government, non-profit and media people who are passionate about open government. We talked about data specifics, data transfer, local applications, data and media and the related national scope. I'll be putting up at least one post at the Personal Democracy Forum about that. Here's a great summary at Spot.Us. Meanwhile, I was invited this week to be on two more conference program committees. More on that when they're official.

Meanwhile, as we were finishing up with the data apps in SF, the House voted on their final version of the healthcare reform bill. It was interesting to follow that on Twitter while in a room full of government software developers. Finally, I was surprised this morning to be on a list of Top 20 Women Political Bloggers (I think the list is a subset of liberal bloggers who are also moms).

This week, I'm working on an article about Google Wave and editing a book on confidential information. I'm also working on a couple new gov 2.0 related projects that I hope to write more about soon.