October 30, 2004 (frosty)
3 days to go, and over 450,000 votes so far!
It would be really cool to have half a million or more.... Keep spreading the word, and keep checking back!
I started a Zulio Group to try to connect the betavoters to each other. Zulio is a social-network (friend-of-a-friend) web site that is content-focused, meaning you can put things in (like photo galleries, blogs, reviews, etc) and select who gets to see them. It's also where I've been working the last year, and we just relaunched with new features and a somewhat better design. Your most direct way to support Betavote is to join that group on Zulio - and hopefully it's going to be a useful way to get all the people who are interested in betavote to connect.
What's next for Betavote?
Daniel and I have decided to keep Betavote going after the US election. We are working on another question to ask, and we will put it up when the "polls" close on Nov. 2. We hope it will capture everyone's imagination as much as this vote has, and bring more attention to the importance of world opinion in matters of global interest.
We also have some plans for the Betavote data. As soon as the polls close we will freeze the data and present the final result. As much as we might like to make fancy blinking maps and super graphs of the betavote data, I don't have time and Daniel doesn't have the server password. Oh, and neither of us is a mathematician, statistician, or other -ician. So instead we're going to release the raw data in its entirety and let the community have a go at it. Of course we will not release it with the IP addresses, for obvious privacy reasons.
This will be under some sort of Creative Commons-style license. Basically you will be able to do anything you want with the data as long as you link back to the source page and include an attribution in your publication, be it on the web or elsewhere. We will be happy to put any interesting graphs, charts, analyses or blinking maps on the Betavote site. You can expect that data to show up towards the end of next week.
I should also mention something about the ads, as long as you've read this far. We were hoping to have some targeted ads on the site to help cover the bandwidth cost... and so far it has helped a little, in that it's paid for October's hosting bill and part of November's. But as you may have noticed, the "targeting" has not been as smart as we'd hoped. I'm looking into that and hopefully will have ads for the next round that are not a waste of your time. Until then, I hope at least some of you have called American Samoa for four cents. :-)
Once again, thanks to all of you for making Betavote such a success. If we all keep up the interest beyond the election, then the site can hopefully have a positive, if small, impact by serving as a reminder that the opinions of ordinary people around the world do matter.
And finally, last but not necessarily least: the apologies section. Sorry to all the people who have sent comments and haven't been answered. I've just been too busy with other things and haven't had any time to work on Betavote stuff for, oh, almost a month now. Sorry also to all the supporters of Badnarik and Cobb, the two other legitimate national-party candidates in this race; and to supporters of Nader, the high-profile independent; and also to supporters of Leonard Peltier, the definitive protest candidate; and to anyone who feels left out of the above list. We did in fact intend at some point to put the minor-party, obscure-party, semi-party and indie candidates in this poll, and of course a write-in option. I just didn't have time to make the changes, and after the vote had gotten into the hundreds of thousands it probably wouldn't have been wise to do so anyway. I do wish we'd had them in from the beginning in some way, and in 2008 we will definitely include everyone. And a final apology to anyone who used the mini-mail form on my home page; it was broken and not sending me the actual message content. I'm going to reply to all those individually to let you know I missed the messages. This concludes the self-flagellation section.
September 30, 2004 (frosty)
Over 200,000 votes so far!
And over 500,000 page views for September. Thanks everyone and keep spreading the word! The server can take it! :-)
We also noticed we had not corrected the Taiwan entry in a couple of places. That's fixed now. Apologies once again to all Taiwanese visitors; we did not misstate your country's name on purpose. Thanks to Andrew Gray in Taiwan for bringing this to our attention.
September 26, 2004 (frosty)
Normally I wouldn't post two news updates in a day, but this just came in.
Apparently the OSCE is thinking about monitoring the US elections, for what it's worth.
This is also being discussed on Slashdot, with the usual mix of insightful comments and sqeaking vitriol.
September 26, 2004 (frosty)
Over 150,000 votes! Hurrah!
Well over, indeed. This is really getting interesting; thanks to all the people who voted and apologies to anyone whose e-mail has not been answered yet.
We had some more server trouble... well, this time it was network trouble actually... and once again it's been fixed and with a little luck there won't be any more downtime. (Famous last words?)
Betavote is rapidly approaching half a million page views for September. Thanks again to everyone who linked, mailed or otherwise spread the word. Please keep it up.
With a little over a month to go before the election, we're hoping to get even more visitors and more votes and perhaps even to raise consciousness of global opinion in political matters.
You'll notice some ads on some of the pages. I decided to give text ads a try to see if it might help cover the hosting cost. If the ads crash your browser or otherwise cause problems please let us know since this is very experimental at the moment and so far I haven't been very impressed with the algorithms that are supposed to find "relevant" ads for some of the pages.
Hopefully now that the latest round of server/network problems are fixed, I really hope to make some of the promised changes & improvements over the coming week.
September 22, 2004 (frosty)
We had another server outage last night; apologies to all who tried to connect then but couldn't.
Also you may have noticed the timestamp for the results on the main page. That list is now being generated every ten minutes to reduce server load. We will probably do the same for the "results" link, but what you see when you vote will always be the live, up-to-the-second count.
September 13, 2004 (frosty)
Betavote continues to generate interest, and we've passed the 100,000 vote mark. Thanks everyone!
You may have noticed that the server was going offline and/or generating errors pretty regularly. I moved everything to a much more powerful machine, and hopefully things will be OK now.
This week I'm trying to get some of the planned changes made, so please check back every few days to see the improvements (well, we hope they will be improvements anyway).
I also fixed the Taiwan entry -- apologies to our Taiwanese visitors; I have no idea why it was listed as "Province of China" -- we got the original country list from some ISO website but now I've forgotten which one, so I can't follow up with that.
Thanks to everyone else who has pointed out mistakes in our country list. I'm hoping to clean that up this week.
August 21, 2004 (frosty)
Looks like the database server crashed, probably sometime on the 19th (Thursday).
I was sick and therefore offline for a few days, so I didn't notice.
It's back up now (obviously) and I have no idea why it crashed, nor (unfortunately) do I have time to investigate it. All I can say is that Betavote is running on a little user mode Linux setup without a whole lot of processing power or memory, so if the load gets high it can have odd effects.
So.... sorry for the inconvenience. And for not answering any emails the last week :-P
Aug 17, 2004 (frosty)
I fixed the Åland link; sorry about that. Those votes are now considered Finnish.
After discussing it with Daniel it became clear that asking for e-mails would not be a good idea... it sounds too much like "registration" (and like non-anonymous ballots) and we therefore think it would be a barrier to participation.
We may, however, put in some of those slightly distorted images to ensure that only humans vote. I just deployed some other anti-robot goodness so maybe that will be enough by itself.
We're also going to add other parties and rework the layout a bit, but it's doubtful that will get finished in the next week, since I have too much to do at my job.
Aug 12, 2004 (frosty)
We're the subject of a few online discussions these days, mostly in Europe.
We try to respond whenever we know about the thread and can understand the language it's in, but this is just a hobby for us and we haven't much time, so please don't feel bad if we don't respond to your comment or discussion thread.
It really helps if people send us some kind of link to the discussions, since otherwise we often miss them when they're active.
There was a bit of a problem about a Niger which somehow coincided with BetaVote being talked about in Finland; we fixed up the immediate damage and are thinking about how to protect ourselves a bit better in the future.
We also removed a country code and hope we did the right thing.
I need to get the FAQ updated as well, especially regarding third-party candidates.
This page may turn into some kind of BetaVote blog, or it may not, depending on how much attention we get and how much of it is weird :-)