I was looking around this site a little bit today and I found out there was a point system to select who gets the scholarships. I looked at this and said cool I thought I was posting at a good rate and stood a chance. I looked at my own blog and I had accumulated 300 something points. I figured I had as much in comments as well. I then looked at one person’s blog and they didn't have as much as I did. I then decided to look at someone who I see post a lot. I looked at LP's blog and he had accumulated get this,
964,357 Points
Wow that's amazing, on just posts alone, no comments. Several of his posts had thousands of reads. Which leads to my question what causes your post to get so many reads; my thought is that it has something to do with your title. LP had one titled "What Now In the Mohammed Cartoon Dispute?" That post had 1549 reads, and will probably get more because of this post. So congratulations to LP for doing a fine job. Feel free to count and post your points as well.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
It's hard posting here, especially knowing that some people cheat for their points. When I post something, I inform my entire dorm to keep up to date, and hats where most of my posts come from, but its impossible to compete with people who unjustly inflate their point totals.
Correction, I realized that the above might seem like an attack on LP. That's not what I;m saying at all. It was just a general comment on some people, and not LP specifically.
I was wondering about that:)
Super, your calculation of LP's point total doesn't look correct (I'm one of the moderators).
We need to run some scripts against the database and do some manual checks to get exact totals, but I think your number for LP is off by a couple orders of magnitude.
A few points here:
+ Don't get discouraged if your initial posts don't get as many reads as you might hope for. Persistance pays off in blogging, in several different ways.
+ Promoting your blog does help. There are several ways to do this. Some are outlined here. Others in the FAQ. Tell your whole dorm to read your posts. Then tell them to talk about your blog on other message boards. It does make a difference in the long run.
+ Many popular blog posts start with a few key hits from search engines. One of the people who stumbles across your post may be an influential blogger or webmaster who posts a link to your post. Well-written, unique, or timely content garners search hits, so you never know when your post might be "discovered."
+ It doesn't pay to cheat in this competition. We have logs of all reads for each post, including the IP addresses where the reads come from. As explained in the official rules, we may disqualify entrants who attempt to manipulate the system. We track this carefully, but if you suspect any abuses, please feel free to alert us.
There are many deserving bloggers this semester. We will do our best to reward as many of you as possible. As mentioned elsewhere, we are working to secure additional funding for more scholarships. There will be bonus opportunities. We will also announce a few editor/moderator positions with stipends in the near future.
In short, be confident that you are making an impact if you are blogging about things that are important to you. We will try to help you with tools and techniques, but in the long run it's your passion that will pay off.
i wish i had that many points. Nolies is gonna win fo sho. She gets than than 500 views for every post.
And if I wasn't so lazy, maybe I would cheat. But i don't think that cheating would make much of a difference - when people are getting a couple of thousand hits on posts, it's not worth it to sit there pressing "ctrl+r".
Look man...just blog this site for fun...forget about scholarship..seriously.
In all seriousness, is there no way to check how many points one has accumulated? I don't know if I'd like to go through the 927429473 posts I've commented on to figure out how many points I have.
"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
"Freedom of press is limited to those who own one."
H. L. Mencken
all those points make me feel like sitting in the comp a whole week and posting blogs but i cant even stay for 2hrs.