Still Shamelessly Self Promoting
I would like to not have to talk about this too much more, honestly, and just focus on baseball, but I feel like it’s wisdom to remind you all of the $10,000 scholarship I’ve been nominated for thanks to my work here. Hopefully, if you’re reading this, you’ve enjoyed some of my writing, and you’re willing to take ten seconds, click the link and vote for me.
Thanks to the early response, I’ve had a comfortable lead for most of the contest. However, the current second place nominee has been flooding Daily Kos, getting 11 stories posted about the scholarship in the last five days, and racking up hundreds of votes from folks who have never heard of him but simply are voting because he shares their political beliefs.
Daily Kos is a machine, and their readership obviously dwarfs ours. However, I’m somewhat hopeful that the fact that you guys actually read this blog and feel some connection to the work here will motivate you to vote, and we can hold off the DailyKos mob.
So, if you haven’t yet, please go vote. It’s open through Thursday night, but voting now and helping keep the lead fairly safe will also help me sleep a bit better at night…
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92 Responses to “Still Shamelessly Self Promoting”
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Are you serious? Just in the “launching attack” diary he’s called
– a creep
– a bum
– a whiner, including “fucking whiner”
““let’s make Dave look bad because he’s not on our side†part of the discussion that makes me sad.”
I know. What is the point of putting up a diary to accuse Dave of the evil of self-promotion (apparently because he asked for votes on his own blog) after the Kos-approved candidate put up his own dKos diary entry, complete with bullet points on how to help him win?
Link? It is a huge community and every comment can’t be controlled. If it was truly offensive, the community members bury it. By and large, the comments have been respectful and I have seen a lot of support for Mariner in the diaries.
Burnt Orange Report is a terrific blog and they are encouraging their users to cross-post at Daily Kos.
If people want to be upset, it should be at the system in place to give out the scholarship. As of now, it is being used to promote the contest virally — which is probably what the creators had in mind. After all, it has been driving tons of traffic to their site.
No matter which David wins, the system seems to be flawed. If it were a writing contest, the people running the contest should have judged it themselves. But, they likely wanted it to become an online battle to drive eyeballs. Mission accomplished.
No need for a blog battle. For my part, if I see any disrespectful comments — I will call them out and ask them to tone it down.
Best wishes.
People like rubygal just interpret the world through a very narrow ideological filter. It’s unfortunate in the sense that an open mind is always a stronger one. She needs an enemy, I guess, kind of like when W poked China with a stick during the initial months of his first term (Japan didn’t take the bait when W sunk a vessel full of Japanese school children).
People like that guy happycamper/arc are just evil because they rot from the inside due to a cancerous hatred of themselves and they spew vile in a flailing attempt to grasp the lifeline their subconscious knows it desperately needs. He’s the epitome of a troll.
Don’t get me started on progressives… 🙂
… oh, you better not.
Here is the difference — nobody at Burnt Orange or Daily Kos put up a post saying “USS Mariner Dave is getting all of his baseball buddies to gang up on me”. Dave’s mistake was calling out the Daily Kos community – of which Burnt Orange and David Mauro are part of. It came across as whining to some. Mariner Dave should have rallied his baseball troops, stuck to selling points about himself and why he deserves the scholarship rather than putting down somebody else’s efforts. Mariner Dave has no idea how many Daily Kos readers also read Burnt Orange Report and/or David Mauro.
Read this sentence again:
Isn’t it kind of insulting for Mariner Dave to basically state that nobody reads Burnt Orange? Nobody at Burnt Orange is posting a thing about Mariner Dave — they are only talking about David Mauro’s qualifications and trying to rally support.
Perhaps Mariner Dave would be better off sticking to his own selling points.
He never says that no one reads BOR.
And really, look at what Dave says there: that he’s racking up hundreds of votes from folks who have never heard of him but are voting for him because they share the same political views.
If you read those diaries, there’s really no way to dispute that: there’s a ton of people on there that say they voted for those very reasons. Do you really think there aren’t hundreds of votes out of the 8k Mauro has that weren’t BOR readers but voted because it got linked on Kos?
Or, to put this a different way: BOR made the case for it, Mauro made the case for it, and they got x votes. The Kos mid-day post link and today’s diary note got them many thousands more. Isn’t it reasonable to conclude that there was a large turnout of people who came from Kos who did not respond to the earlier BOR/Mauro notes?
Am I to believe that every vote for Mariner Dave is a dedicated reader? As I linked above:
That post indicates there are many other sties promoting Mariner Dave. How is that different? Other than the Daily Kos community being larger than the baseball community?
I think there have been times that the authors at USSM wished Corco wasn’t a loyal reader….
I find it interesting that SBN (host of Lookout Landing and Field Gulls) is affiliated with DailyKoz.
Anyway, if Dave doesn’t win this thing I propose to put up that link to paypal again, this time with “Get Dave through college” instead of “buy us a beer”.
Actually, I now notice that the paypal link is still there. Just a hint…
I guess that’s my problem with all of this; shouldn’t this be about whose writing is better and deserving of financial support to further develop it, not just writing about something you personally agree with, or think is more “important”?
And really, I find it difficult to believe that a political writer can’t practically fall backwards into funding, in today’s political climate.
Writing about this team so diligently and thoroughly for these last few years has been a thankless job, and I’m sure there’s days that the authors have really struggled to come up with something to write about; and yet they’ve all continued to give us great articles again and again.
With a political blog on the other hand, there’s ALWAYS something compelling to write about; you’re mining a much richer vein.
I agree with those that say this contest was structured poorly; it’s obviously become much more about how many eyeballs you can get your plea in front of than any actual measure of merit.
(disclaimer: I don’t know this Mauro guy and haven’t gone to look around his blog; he may very well be deserving on his own merits. But it’s pretty clear that if he does win, it won’t be the primary reason why, and that’s the part I have a problem with)
I think there’s absolutely a difference, and I’ll again attempt to draw the distinction.
Dave, here: I’m up for a scholarship, if you appreciate my stuff, I’d appreciate your support
Other sites: Dave’s up for a scholarship, he does great work on USSM, check it out if you haven’t (you can go search Google blogs for instances).
It’s an affirmative endorsement of Dave’s work here and appreciation.
The endorsements of Mauro have often been “side” arguments. Take just the front page Kos today:
“One of our own.” It’s not an endorsement even of the work. It’s an endorsement of the subject matter he pursues, and it sets Dave up as not being “one of our own” — he’s an outsider.
Which brings me back around to my longer post about what’s bothering me, and I’ll just ask everyone cross-apply those points.
DMZ said what I did but better so deleting this.
and, if I may– it is also frustration with comments that show the voter didn’t bother to look at the competition:
“but, alas, he doesn’t have the lead. David Cameron, who, I’m told, is a blogger for the Seattle Mariners, is about 900 votes ahead. His lead was more than 2000 last night, so we can hope that David Mauro with the help of the liberal blogosphere will continue to pick up support.”
or from his most enthusiatic diarist, who replied to a Mauro post thanking her for the postings and diaries with: “Honestly, I want to get Cameron..I don’t have anything against him..it is just that sports blogging is way too bourgeois for this day and age..you should get that scholarship”
This isn’t over yet. Dave’s only down by 728 votes with 4 days to go. Let’s keep up the support.
I voted. And that’s before I knew he was running against a pinko commie.
I voted!
Good luck!!!
msb, are you familiar with the works of Thursday Braun? Kyle de Beausset? Did you go through and read each of their blog entries before determining that you wanted to vote for Mariner David because he is the best writer?
It seems like you are mad at the Daily Kos community for doing exactly what you are doing. If you want to win, do what naviomelo suggested — get out the vote!
As far as the comments that “sports blogging is way too bourgeois for this day and age” — newsflash — anonymous message board users have opinions!
I know this was in a previous comment thread, so you may have missed it, but yeah, msb did read the other blogs and commented on it.
People are not upset because voters aren’t reading every blog. It’s because they aren’t reading any. Judging by several comments on Daily Kos, many people voted for political David without reading his or anyone’s blog.
The funny thing about it is that it mirrors real elections. People voting without any real knowledge of the candidates because they share the same religion/ideology/geographic location/whatever. So even the politically inclined cannot escape the plague of modern American politics. Funny, in a sad way…
I particularly liked Danielle Lee’s blog which tries to bring science and nature to both an urban setting and students
this reminds me of an Abigail Adams quote I just read, on the subject of false attack-articles, 1797:
“The mischief of these publications arises from their circulating amongst persons, and in places, where no inquiry is made into facts.”
Good luck Dave!
I should be more specific — I wasn’t reminded of the quote because of this particular situation; it was that I thought of the last election when I read that 210-year old quotation the other day …
Fair enough msb, it is admirable that you read the other blogs. However, I think you are probably the exception to the rule.
It would seem your beef is with the rules of the contest – not the Daily Kos readers using the system as it was designed.
Good luck to you to all.
I don’t like the idea of online voting, but I especially don’t like that it might lead someone to go onto a high-traffic site and request that they “smurf” the vote in his favor, or that others on that site would attempt to paint one of his competitors as a villain.
Man, so many people making so many judgments about my character based on so few words.
Here, let me sum this up for everyone.
1. I don’t feel like I deserve this scholarship. There’s no way I’m the best blogging college student out there. If this was being judged on the merits of our writing, there’d be someone out there better than all of us who didn’t even get nominated.
2. I haven’t asked one single person to post this on their site. I’m sure the DK people won’t believe me, but all of the baseball sites who asked their readers to vote for me did so without prompting. It was actually pretty cool to watch Neyer, Baker, et al put in a plug for me without asking. I didn’t rally the baseball blogosphere to come to my aid – they did that on their own.
3. Because of the fact that I’ve been writing here for going on six years and have written for BP/THT/Fangraphs, most people who are fairly regular readers of all those “other sites” have almost certainly read some of my stuff. The majority of my votes have come from USSM anyway (this is clear if you watch the vote spikes after the various posts have gone up), suggesting that probably 80-90% of all people voting for me have read some of my stuff at some point.
That’s just not true of the people who are voting for Mauro. If you saw the votes that he got after he plugged the contest on his own blog, it’s clear where his votes are coming from, and it’s not Burnt Orange Report.
4. Personally, I think an online poll is a really odd way to give out $10,000. However, it seems unlikely to me that the folks at CollegeScholarship.org wanted this to be the result – one blog with a huge readership picking the winner because they were ideological cousins. Just like I’d imagine David Mauro would be fairly unhappy if ESPN decided to put me on Sportscenter and tell everyone to vote for me during Monday Night Football, I think the idea that everyone should be fine with Daily Kos deciding who gets a college scholarship is a bit stupid.
This isn’t a contest about the quality of our work. But at the same time, this is clearly not what it’s supposed to be either.
“but simply are voting because he shares their political beliefs”
I’ll say it: a vote for Dave Cameron is a vote for Baseball and America!!!!
I feel a little sorry for the Citizen Orange blogger, who is also a dKos diarist, but neglected to promote himself on the site.
I’m sorry to see Dave behind… I voted because I enjoy this site, and thought this was an easy way to show support. I have to say, I’m hardly surprised to see an online poll subject to chicanery. Though, I am surprised that a more objective method isn’t being used.
Either way, keep up the quality additions to the baseball community. USSM is the only sports blog I read, and may well be the best blog in my daily rotation.
I didn’t even realize I was a member of the bourgeoisie!
Anyway, the whole way this is turning out is really disappointing, and Dave summed up pretty nicely in his comment why; he said “hey, I’m up for this, if you like my writing and think I deserve it, go vote for me”; people on the other hand were being encouraged by the DailyKOS machine to vote for their Dave simply because he happened to be part of their clique.
I don’t blame them so much for that, but whoever came up with this as a way to award a five-figure scholarship needs to be taken out behind the woodshed.
Good luck Dave! You guys have been on been on my bookmark toolbar for as long as there have been bookmark toolbars.
It is a poor way to award a scholarship. However, I don’t think we pick the best President every 4 years, and I think the judicial jury system is a travesty.
Vote early. Vote often.
One of the things I’ve admired about this sight throughout the past year has been the fact that no political garbage is ever brought up or permitted to remain on this sight even in the meta. It always seems that the even the most analytical and intelligent political sites cease to be so and shamelessly pimp one candidate or another whenever an election comes around. I can’t stand reading things by normally smart people who are willfully being ignorant.
lordy. now they are getting just a little odd:
dammit, that’s just frickin’ elitist.
And that’s coming from someone who IS an elitist!
The words “fairness” and “Daily Kos” should never collide in the same sentence. I hate that site. More reason to vote for Dave.
Personally, I think an online poll is a really odd way to give out $10,000.
This. When I was nominated last year, I visited every other site in the contest, and thought, “Hey, none of these sites have a lot of readers. I’m a shoo-in!” And I was leading by 1,000 votes two days after voting started.
But your writing or readership doesn’t matter. What matters is who can create the best viral marketing through Facebook, larger sites, etc…. It’s just a totally strange way to determine a $10,000 scholarship.
I will say, though, that the “voting purely because of political ideology”-complaint isn’t exactly pure. Most of David’s votes are coming from people who happen to share a hobby or interest. There’s nothing wrong with that in this format, but I’m just saying….
no, it will never be a “fair” way to award a scholarship.
Trying not to sound heartless here, but it appears that the eventual winner last year was the recipient of a lot of sympathy votes, as her blog chronicled her battle with cancer …
And for those from Chicago, vote even if you’re dead. 🙂
And what’s irritating is that my political ideology is pretty close to the kos crowd. But ideological tests irritate me, no matter what…
Sorry dude, emotions got the best of me and I voted for David. You got caught in a silly firefight. I’ll vote for you from work to balance it out.
– Kos reader.