The time has arrived for you to choose your favourite bloggers and re-experience your favourite posts. We start out this week with what will be a hideously tough challenge for the best single posts on life as a qualified lawyer and life as a law student. Get stuck in!
Due to the number of categories and quality of entries we will stagger the judging categories over the coming weeks, with the overall best blogger of the lot being chosen right at the end. Please leave comments expressing your support or discussing your favourite entries.
The popular vote will count for one-quarter of the final result, with three judges weighing in for one quarter each. Each method will ultimately determine the top 4 blog posts or bloggers in order.
The first-placed by poll and by each juror respectively will get 4 points, down to 1 point for the fourth placed. The points will be tallied and the one with the most number of points wins. In the event of tied points, popular vote points will act as the decider. This methodology may be subject to slight amendment if it proves necessary in the interests of the competition.
Now that the rules are clear and without further ado, please welcome the all-round excellent entries which were selected with particpation of each blogger.
Student - best single blog post on student life
Each registered Legally India reader can vote for up to three of their favourite posts in this wide category that aims to find the best overall post about life as a law student.Which posts captured your daydreams, rang true in recogition, described things as you always wanted to say them or were simply your favourite?
Take your pick from the below shortlist of the best student blogs. To the winner go Rs 5,000 plus of course the recognition of being crowned as the best chronicler of student life.
LegalPoet
- Puppy Training: The ABCs Of a National Law University: Part I- Adjusting
- ABCs of National Law Schools: R = Ragging (Chetan Bhagat is Outdated)
- I Came. I Saw. I Changed. 17 THINGS that HIT you in an NLU. How to Prepare
- INTERNSHIP: Hidden Camera reveals the INTERN, a name change and his DEATH
- A hot girlfriend, a hot-shot job and the 5th years still leave crying
sss
nandiireywal
john2010
danishsheikh
folly_nariman
- Mooting as the Professionals Do It :- Part I
- Positive Interaction and my Observations
- Due Diligence and Dreaming Beyond It.
DisplacedBong
Simba
napster
Qualified lawyer - best blog on life as a qualified lawyer
Each reader can vote for one favourite single blog post that really captures what it is like practising as a qualified lawyer in a law firm or in the courts or elsewhere. There are no criteria and your favourite posts could be thought-provoking, funny, weird or all or none of the above. The choice is yours.The winner gets Rs 5,000 in cash and of course the knowledge that their pen/keyboard best captured those eternal truths (or lies?) of lawyering.
anirban1
nandiireywal
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NB: To vote you must login or create a free Legally India account [VOTING NOW CLOSED]
If you have previously created an account but it was never activated, click here and we will resend your activation code by email. If you can not remember your password, click here to reset it.If you have not yet signed up, create a free account here - it only takes two minutes. By all means, tell your friends to create a new account but in order to prevent multiple voting by the same person or other fraud please be aware that we will be monitoring new account creation for suspicious activity and by IP addresses. Any suspected fraud could result in invalidating those votes and/or disqualification of the blogger concerned. Legally India's decisions will be final in any case.
You can sign in and vote below with either your email address or username:
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We have multiple techniques for doing this and will check up thoroughly on voting patterns if they prove to be suspicious.
There is of course a potential issue with getting friends to vote for you, which is an advantage if you do not blog anonymously. There is not much to be done on that front but this should be balanced out by the jury voting mechanism.
@2 naturalthing - Rewards for voters. Warm glow of supporting good legal writing? Suggestions on a post card please! :-)
Best
Kian
LegalPoet voted on one of his entries through LegalPoet. He should have voted for three (according to rules). It just slipped my mind.
LegalPoet will not use any of the other IDs to vote. And if he does use, Mr. Kian Ganz will definetely know. Right Mr. Kian? :-)
@Kian: Please make this a sticky blog so that it stays at the top till the voting is over.
Posts are not getting votes because of good writing but because a blogger is able to convince his/her friends to vote. This is specially true for law students (mea culpa).
I am doing it and I am sure Napster, SSS and others too are doing it. Folly (easily the best 'law student post' writer) is not getting any votes as she has preferred to remain anonymous.
Kindly think of scrapping the voting system. Maybe, you can first have judges come with their list of the best posts and then have a vote on the selected entries.
Cheers.
-
folly (too impatient to sign in)
Well, I am wary that I might be projecting myself as a saintly person which I am not(want to rake in as much moolah as I deserve) :D. But I feel that this whole process needs to be improved.
For example Napster’s post ‘Love @Law School’, my post of ‘Hot Girlfriends’ and the post on ‘People You Meet’ are good, but just not good enough to get as many votes as they are getting. These posts are well written but not brilliant at all [1]. Just because they mirror the reader’s feelings and because many readers have been asked to vote by the writers of these posts [2], the posts are becoming top rankers.
Ideally, each one of your (Folly’s) posts, my posts on ‘Internship’ and ‘Adjusting’ [3] and all Nandii Reywal’ posts should slog it out for votes. This will only be fair because these were outstanding writings.
Take another ‘fairness’ example: for the ‘overall best blogger’ prize, a blogger needs to be ‘regular’. So if you (Folly) gets that tag of ‘regular blogger’, I will raise my voice against it too [4]. I mean you have 5 posts and blogged for not more than one month [5]. :D
-------------------
Footnotes:
[1] Co-bloggers, please don’t take it personally. I know I am being judgmental and that my judgment is probably correct. :D
[2] This is perfectly legal.
[3] Egoist poet; can’t help it.
[4] Yes quality matters more. But ‘regular’ should reasonably mean regular.
[5] LegallyIndia’s decision will be final, of course.
1. Yes, people are obviously getting friends to vote - not much anyone can do about it in any popular vote. Indeed this was foreseeable and expected, which is why the popular vote counts only for 25% of totals.
2. This is a popular vote. Therefore posts about the things people enjoy reading about deserve to get votes. Ultimately that is exactly what the popular vote is supposed to do: give some fair due to blogging that is popular. The independent judges will be just as unpredictable as the popular vote no doubt...
Happy blogging/voting!
Kian
Is the aim of this competition to find the most popular law student (not even popular blogger) or the best legal blog writers? BTW 'hits' are good indicators of the popularity of a post.
And can you tell me one reason why my (Legal Poet's), Napster's and SSS's posts have seen a constant increase in the no. of votes while Folly's, Danish's and John10's (equally popular and well written) posts have stayed put?
The reason is simple: people who are getting friends to vote are ending winners.
(I know this should be pestering for you, but please try to see how you can conduct this exercise in a better way).
If you have any suggestions, by all means make them. No popular voting system is unriggable or impossible to influence and it seems whatever kind of popular vote we would come up with, someone would always be able to find a way to push it in their favour. Even 'hits' you can rig and are not objective.
The only option is to abandon the popular voting completely. But I think the process is a nice way for readers to engage in the competition and read some of the bloggers' older posts which they may have missed. Right now, judging by our records, a lot of the voting is happening along college lines, which is to be expected in any case for non-anonymous bloggers, irrespective of getting friends to vote.
And perhaps by the time the second set of category votes come even friends of bloggers will be bored with clicking for their friends and be more objective and go for quality. And bloggers do not have to waste their time, as you say, convincing friends to vote.
Kian
Regards,
Legal Dodo
That is a good idea indeed.
I did briefly consider this earlier but the reason we did not do this was because only around 3,000 readers have a Legally India account, some of which are relatively inactive. This is only a small fraction of total blog readers and people who might want to vote but who would be unfairly disqualified. It also means total votes might only be a couple of dozens at most.
Technically the solution would be slightly complicated but not impossible to implement. But it would probably not be fair to discount the votes of anyone in this round since the rules were announced beforehand and people went through the effort of voting.
For the next category round, perhaps we can try this but I am concerned that not many votes would come in.
And even so, some users have been a lot more active than others on the Legally India social network and could end up lobbying for their votes with existing social network users or friends that are online also.
Again, will have to think about it. But perhaps the best way is to just request bloggers in future rounds not to do any overt lobbying or getting friends to vote and try to rely on this to an extent?
Another option is that we could try to condense and average all votes coming from the same IP addresses (which in some cases are law school library computers), although that at most would reduce vote tallies by only a few.
Or we could discount all votes that only voted for one blogger where they had an option of 3, or gave all their votes to the same blogger?
In short, I do not think there is an easy way that encourages reader participation in the process yet is completely unriggable. And any system that we announce can likely be circumvented if someone is serious about it anyway.
Will keep an open mind on the issue.
Thanks for your suggestions,
Kian
My personel favorite is John2010 's post When things go wrong... because i feel he has a very important message to deliver.However John2010 post is languishing at the bottom of the voting chart which maybe another example of readers subjective choice.
The popular voting system does have its drawbacks.Most of us understand that and are getting our friends to vote too.(You will see this happening in reality Tv shows as well where contestants even get their friends new phones to vote for them).So instead of gratifying some posts and trying to bring down others and cribbing about the voting system Learn to Deal With It. :D :D :D :D :D
Please read footnotes 1 and 3.
And frankly and egotistically speaking, I should be the last one to 'crib' about the voting system. (See the voting results). :P
poet- whats your problem man? you are sitting right behind that prankster guy and still u r complaining? stop being an idealist. thats the problem with your kind of people. get practical and money minded.
ganz- editor sahab! please don't waste our time. i spent my precious time creating and account and voting. i voted three posts of my friend poet. i voted for him coz he is my friend and coz i love his writings also.
i also love nandi but coz i am poet's friend it was natural for me to vote for him. and now u say that such votes will be cancelled!!!!! don't do that and waste our time and effort.
the only good suggestion of yours is to make bloggers sign an mou which tells them not to beg for votes. then it comes to bigger question of ethics over which no one has any control. but when legallyindia itself said that 'by all means encourage your friends to make account', maybe the law students went over board. you yourself were at fault.
still a friend and still an admirer.
a potential new blogger.
lawnchdaddy
First of all, clarifications. My frequent readers are usually people in my college who like reading blogs and interesting articles. Once they like the site, they become frequent visitors. Ofcourse they will read all my blogs atleast once and give me their review. Friends tend to do that. They will also be from the same ip as all of us are in the hostels or in the library. Till now, all they could have done was read my blog and give me suggestions.
Now voting has started. This means that the only way that they can show their love for my post (if any) is by making an account and then voting. Keep it in mind, till now, they did not need to make accounts to read stuff. They only need an account to vote. So you can see a sudden spurt in the number of accounts.
Now about the competition.
I did not start writing to win money. I wrote because I liked expressing myself in whatsoever way I can (good/bad). I love writing and so I write. But tell me one thing, why would I not want to 'win' something? I am not saying I want money, even the best blogger certificate would mean a lot. (Not everything is about money).
Suggestion:
This might involve a lot of work on the part of the judges but still.
The judges can read all the nominated posts. They can choose their top 4. Now, these top 4 can now be voted for by the crowd. So people can vote only for 4 posts.
I think that the fact that my name comes up last on the list is a detriment to my chances of getting some 'unknown' votes. Just wanted to convey, don't want anything to change. :-)
@Legalpoet- I agree with Simba. Read his/her comment again. :-)
@Kian- Don't use the 'Hits' to determine good posts. Its easily beatable. People will keep making accounts, no one can stop that. The suggestion I gave was the best thing I could come up with. Hope it helps. Also, this way, the voting will go on for a long long time, any chance of getting done with it sooner? Because of the voting the flow of new posts has almost stopped.
@23- Your friend is already practical and money minded. MOU is not a good idea. Too tough to implement. Don't vote because your friend asked you to, read other posts and then choose what you want. Individual decisions, heard of it?
Cheers
Keep voting. I am about to lose the lead. I wonder why my friends are not coming online. :P
Napster.
P.S. I love the new chat. :D
@kianganz ... what you are saying abt the IP addresses is absolutely right, but there are simpler solutions to it. Get any web designer to do it for you.
"Napster’s post ‘Love @Law School’, my post of ‘Hot Girlfriends’ and the post on ‘People You Meet’ are good, but just not good enough to get as many votes as they are getting"- I also talk about my post not being good enough.
And when I said 'my judgment is prolly right' I used a smiley which goes like :D...which means I am kidding.
And again see my footnote [3] in which I say 'egoist poet'.
And 26, we will surely uphold our country's law with full might. But I don't think that this is an ideal platform for that. Give us a bit of a leeway here; let us write, engage in discussions and pull some legs. :P (smiley used. take note).
And as bloggers, we would like the selection process to be fair. What seems childish to you might be serious business for others. I hope you understand. And if I have hurt anyone, please accept my apologies.
Do you even know about poet's passionate involvement in the IDIA- diversity and legal education project? he is considered to be prof. shamnad's right hand man in IDIA.
"LegalPoet, who the hell do you think you are? What are you so smug abt, huh"-
i think only Folly, the blogger has understood what poet is trying to say and she said that 'your grace is admirable'. many of you don't even get what poet is saying. i know his sense of humour is idiosyncratic, but u guys too need to develop some sense of humour.
do you know of any person who is winning the competition but still complains that the process is not right because its not fair? arrogance is anti-thetical to such an act.
and 26, who are you to teach lessons uhm?
Come On! Legal Poet (who is winning the voting by miles) is still fighting for fairness and you say he is smug? Are you guys retards?
Actually I find Poet's god-like conduct unexplainable.
- Poet and his altruistic approach, as can be seen from prior experience, it's another route to garnering more votes by using a sympathy mode... (no issues against you poet, purely my perspective.
-Friends getting to vote, When you get friends to read your posts and hop on from computer to computer in the library or computer lab with self made questions and comments, vote rigging is something which would but obviously follow.
-Languishing at the bottom, Am way way way at the bottom of this list and am frankly fed up of begging for votes. The law school placement ordeal was originally written two years ago and has and will always be a reference guide as to the way people behave in law school. Sutte ki Zubaani was the product of insomniac discussions coupled with guys from UP, Bihar and Bangalore forming an epic confluence which made it come straight from the heart.
-Legallyindia users, LI has suddenly experienced a surge of users, through which it has benefited.
-Uninnovative solutions, Read 'uninnovative' as 'utterly ridiculous' (since am not sure that such a word does exist because the next comment will ask me to clarify my stance since I have poor grammer- Yep! that's how predictable LI has become :-)) . Signing MOU's, bonds etc. clearly reflects first year kids who have the josh to make a valuable difference, that's all...
I again thank LI for this amazing platform and I sincerely look forward to see more engaging discussions in light of altruism, good faith and fairness.
P.S. I suggest that the best blogger should get a cup to commemorate skills apart from overall blogging excellence :-p
Cheers!
SSS
But then, they didn't force the users to create an account and it's good for the website so that's all good. :-)
"as can be seen from prior experience, it's another route to garnering more votes by using a sympathy mode"!!!
what is the prior experience? and sympathy mode? really?
just because you can't win or even come close to it, why are you hitting below the belt?
But if there was a way to do a fair and easy popular vote any other way we would have tried. For example, using Facebook username to get unique votes would have been even worse with anyone out of hundreds of Facebook 'friends' being able to vote with just a click. At least most users who now vote seem to at least have read the posts they are voting for (I hope).
An earlier comment on using different technology would be limited too. The only other major method are cookies and those are also limited in application.
Anyway, thanks for all your input, at least the debate is keeping the process transparent. I think it is best if we keep the system as it is instead of making it even more complicated. Sure, the system can be gamed but so can any system.
See the below article or google for 'moot time marblecake' for a far more high profile and amusing example of popular voting gone wrong.
techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-its-hands-as-it-gets-pwned-by-4chan/
Let's just enjoy it for what it is within the parameters of the competition and keep things fair. And if bloggers or registered users want to 'jostle' with each other fine, but please keep anonymous name-calling of bloggers to a minimum.
In fact, please stop 'jostling' also, it doesn't really do anyone any favours. Friendly competition remains ok, of course.
Happy blogging/voting!
Kian
Saale...Aukaat mein rehke baat kar...sss rules! Probably, his are the only blawgs which actually reflect student life truly!
I plead for no petty name callings please !! That too anonymous ones!Very unbecoming on a site like this.Your future employers might be watching :P :P
Fans and friends of bloggers its high time we stopped My horse is better than your horse debate :D
-Anonymous female fan of his.
Popular vote can be measured in many ways, all extremely fallible. Many bloggers here are anonymous to various degrees; I am perhaps the 'most' anonymous of the lot. This was a choice I consciously made, so that I would be able to write frankly about things that would otherwise ruin my life by turning up on a google search under my name.
For me the choice of anonymity has been worth it. No doubt the non-anonymous bloggers are reaping the advantage of their consciously chosen notoriety at the moment as well. My point is, everyone made their choices early. It should have been obvious to the meanest intelligence that a non-anonymous writer would have a voting advantage over an anonymous one. If you still chose to continue being anonymous to any degree, this is the occupational hazard of anonymity. Here's a humble suggestion - deal with it.
Similarly, if you chose to NOT be anonymous, no doubt you are know that your voting position has as much to do with your ability to write, as your ability to make friends who are willing to hop between library computers for you. There is something very funny, in a ridiculous way, about that mental image, but everyone to his own. I have personally enjoyed most of your blogposts and you are all well within the rules in your actions, so best of luck.
In my longwinded way, I suppose I simply want to reiterate that none of us is going to be the next Steinbeck, and if you are already either popular or convinced of the quality of your writing, you do not need this competition as any sort of ego validation. Also, 5000 rupees is not exactly a lottery jackpot, so let us all quit pretences and admit that this mudslinging is about personal egos and not money.
It may be an outmoded concept, but I request everyone to please show some grace. That is all.
I'm not an ardent fan of poet but I truly admire his conviction and believe me that is the most important part of being a blogger.
He is one of the people who would never conceal his acts if he thinks it was unethical in any way and there are very few people who can do that.
I'm sure Kian has selected competent team of judges who would not be moved by 25% of votes but by the essence of posts. 75% of judge's marks constitute a chunk of marks in the competition. Not any one will take the trophy, it would be given to only those who deserve it.
And yes, poet has bright chances not because he has over 300 fbk frens but because he writes well, he chooses innovative topics, he is consistent and dedicated.
Who are the judges? You are the one...who are the other two? And how can we expect the judging quality to be good when we don't even know who the judges are???
And what is the time limit for voting?
We expect replies to such basic questions. Don't keep us in the dark. Make this competiton fair.
Hopefully we can post up results of the first round soon, we are just collating the judges' votes and checking the public vote for irregularities.
Please bear with us.
Kian
waits for the names of the judges
Kian
Thanks again and all luck to my fellow bloggers!
@Poet: Sadly, couldn't put the "Comfortably Numb" response in since we were asked for only 5 posts!
Vote rigging is too strong a term, SSS. You, me and all 'non-anonymous' bloggers are going all out on Facebook etc. 'encouraging' friends to vote (since many of us are FB friends, we can track each other's activities). If that is 'rigging' I guess we all are rigging votes! :D
But I am against this 'encouraging friends/rigging' because it is unfair to 'anonymous' bloggers. Unfortunately, the blogging rules had an explicit mention of 'by all means tell you friends to make accounts' which worsens the situation.
But Kian says voting makes only 25% of the results and that this was expected. I don't buy his argument and am all for a better process. Maybe allowing the judges to first come out with the shortlist and then allowing public vote will be better.
Folly, instead of 'dealing' with the bad competition rules; I feel we should request for changing the rules. Kian is a very open to suggestions.
Also I'd imagine that the hits that LI gets on its blog pages far exceed the registered member count on LI, which is relatively small. So it is probably unfair to prohibit this (unregistered) floating readership to register its opinion on what is the best blog here. Now in order to give the voting system some credibility, LI would mandate that they register for the purpose of voting. But if he were to permit these new members to register, obviously it would make it easy for non-anonymous bloggers to encourage their friends to register and vote for them. They would have done this with or without Kian's encouragement. It's human behaviour.
So unless voting is reserved as a privilege of the members registered prior to July 31, I do not really see a solution to this problem. Of course, I am very tech-challenged, so if someone finds a way to even the playing field out a little, I would welcome it.
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