It has been an interesting couple of days over at the Brandswag office because of a blog contest we started running on Tuesday. The Top 50 Indiana Blogs contest was started for the sole purpose of sharing the content of Indiana to the masses. Lorraine Ball and I had created a list of 50 blogs we enjoyed reading and this contest was created to support that original list.

The main goal of the contest was to showcase Indiana blogs and allow for some competitive voting on the side. Unfortunately the contest was hacked and screwed up by individuals who either wanted to win the contest or just wanted to create havoc for others involved. It is unfortunate that certain people had to resort to cheating on the contest and because of that fault… we worked through the weekend to fix the problem.

It is important to be authentic and transparent when communicating in the online world… hence… the reason for this blog post. We were under the opinion that it would be fun to launch a blog contest that would showcase the top content in Indiana. We were under the opinion that people would have integrity and only vote once for blogs they enjoyed. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

We did not develop a full scale voting platform (with necessary security features) because we did not want to spend the development money on a fun project… and we did not debate around every negative occurrence that could… happen.

We have received threatening emails and I have ACTUALLY received threatening voice-mails.

It has been suggested that I play the voice-mails on this blog and give bonus points to the individual that figures out the source… but I prefer to act mature every now and again.

The contest has been a success in terms of collecting the many pieces of blog content spread over the state. We received hundreds of nominations for blogs (many I had never heard of) and had awesome responses to many of them! I loved it and I am still loving it.

The contest will be finished and we will have some great content to read in regards to Indiana writers.Check out the contest if you haven’t already! It is awesome!

To those of you who would rather destroy things instead of build them… what goes around comes around… don’t screw with Indiana bloggers.

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