In recent weeks, Dig Publishing has been moving a lot of our content internally over to Google Docs, and this includes this year’s Dig This Award voting, which was done via Google Spreadsheets. It was an exciting voting season and and exciting new technology to be sure.
First off we found out that Google Spreadsheets can only hold 400,000 cells, so after the first few thousand of you had voted, our form stalled and we had to clear it. Problem solved. (Wow there were a lot of votes this year!)
The second problem manifested itself this morning, when we excitedly grabbed the finished copies that had been dropped off at our office. Everything looked great, style, content, cover, everything great. Good job everyone.
Though when advertising and editorial got together for a celebratory handshake, we noticed something. Some of the category winners had changed from Friday to Monday. As you might have noticed, some of the advertisements (five in particular) said they had won when that isn’t what the content said. All told, 13 categories had been voted into a near tie.
Well, as it turns out the Google Spreadsheet remained live all weekend. While we had taken the button off our site and closed voting, the link propagated over the weekend (via email, Twitter and who knows what else), so voting has continued. When editorial got a hold of the voting Monday evening, some of the category winners had shifted by the smallest percentages of votes.
Due to the separation of ad and edit, we didn’t notice the discrepancies until this morning.
There are three things to take away from this:
1. We’ll be thoroughly checking all the (wonderful!) Google products in the future.
2. Congratulations to all our co-winners, which are listed in the online.
3. In alt-weekly land, there is never a dull day.
Enjoy the issue all the same, and if you still feel like partying with us tonight, we promise we won’t disappoint. =)
In fact, if you can find the five advertising to editorial fuck-ups and email us, we’ll add you to the guestlist.
Love you!
The Weekly Dig
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