Wednesday 22 February 2012

An Unexpected Email - Continued

If you go back to my previous post, you will find that I have updated it after someone had left a comment, pointing me towards their own and several other blogs with warnings about participating in the "Facsination Awards" in any manner. I was quite unsure about what to do, since of course I do not wish to cause any harm to anyone by anything I put on my blog, whether it is something I write or something I link to.
And since I could not find anything that appeared to me incriminating or illegit on the websites related to the Fascination Awards, I decided to write to the person who had originally notified me of my nomination.

This morning, I found their reply in my inbox:

Hi Meike,
Thank you for taking the time to express your concerns. We  value your feedback.
Our goal is to seek out only the most fascinating blogs on the web, and we achieve this goal through a very thorough (and time consuming!) nomination/voting process. It is true that the Fascination Awards generate exposure for our website, but that doesn’t make it a scam. On all of the fascination awards pages, including the polling page, you will not find any advertisement of any kind. We also do not collect any kind of personally identifiable information on these pages.
In our most recent application of the Fascination Awards, the ‘Most Fascinating Teaching Blog of 2011’ poll received over 2,200 votes. We take various precautions, such as randomizing the nominees on the poll every time the page is loaded, to ensure the fairness and integrity of the results. We utilize the enterprise version of Survey Monkey’s polling software, so you can be sure that we are serious about our goal, which is to select the most fascinating blogs in the fairest way possible.
We used the results from the poll to create a list titled “Top 100 Teaching Blogs”, you can view it here: http://www.online-phd-degree.net/top-100-teaching-blogs-all-the-best-teaching-blogs/       
A similar list for Librarian blogs will be published after voting is finalized.
If you have any more questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

- - - end of copy - - -

Naturally, I did NOT expect them to come back to me saying "Oh dear... you found us out... yes, the whole Fascination Awards thing is one huge scam, set up for naive guys such as yourself and your readers to make piles of money out of every mouseclick on our pages".
But still, the reply sounds reasonably logical to me, and as if it was written by a real person instead of just a standardized answer from some bot or other.

What do you think? Should I leave the nomination badge on my page or remove it? I am not much nearer to a decision than I was before; I do take the concerns voiced by the other bloggers seriously, and they are probably a lot more knowledgeable about such things than I am.

15 comments:

  1. For what my opinion is worth, I think you should leave it on. That is a sensible, reasonable answer, and I checked out the site and that looks decent and reputable too.

    No harm in trying to get people to view their site, that's what it is all about, but it is quite an honour to be nominated for it, I think.

    Well, as I said, that's my opinion....

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with Jenny - and I'm a suspicious so-and-so as a rule!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you, Jenny and John! By the looks of it, they never realized how things can come across in the wrong light; I thanked them for their explanation, telling them that I have not removed the badge from my site, and this is what they wrote in response:

    Hi Meike,

    Thank you for your kind response. I truly appreciate you taking the time to express your concerns. Going forward, this will help us better explain the awards to other nominees, including how blogs are nominated, how the voting process works, and how the polling process ensures fairness.

    We look forward to your participation and wish you all the best of luck in the voting!

    Happy blogging,
    ____________ (name of my contact)

    So, I guess something good can come out of voicing doubts.

    ReplyDelete
  4. They sound legit to me too. I look for things like poor sentence construction, mispelled words, but this sounds right. You do have a very interesting and varied blog so its no wonder you are getting noticed. You can uncork the champagne now. :))
    xx
    julie

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Julie - but this is only a nomination, not an actual win :-D Still, it is nice to know that I am not writing merely for myself anymore but that there are some people out there actually reading my blog and liking it.

      Delete
  5. It's okay to keep the information as long as people know that it is a ... let's say ruse. It generates traffic for them. On the plus side, I went through their list of bloggers hoping to find some school librarian ones, and did find a couple that were useful to me. And you are, after all, fascinating!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello Ms. Yingling, thank you for stopping by and saying something so kind about my blog!

      Delete
  6. Hi -
    A blog of a friend of mine got a nomination and I ended up reading your blog and your investigations which was helpful, but it really FEELS like a scam - but you wonder, what are they getting out of it? And then I read this
    which explains that your posting the badge and generating clicks for them adds to their legitimacy in their work of being a fake generator of degrees. This makes more sense to me - though I'm sure your blog, like my friend's is lovely!

    https://quantumprogress.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/awards-almost-suckered-again/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Carol, thank you for stopping by and leaving a comment on this topic! The voting etc. is long gone, as well as the badge from my blog. I will check out the link you gave me.

      Delete
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