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.