Why Not All the Entres Received for the 5k Are Posted On This Site

I got this email this morning (May 1, 2000), which is much nicer and funnier than another email on the same topic I got the day before. Read on:


Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 08:51:09 -0400
From: Someone
To: Stewart Butterfield <stewart@sylloge.com>
Subject: You are the second place winner!

Congratulations Stewart:

You are the second place winner in the 5k Contest Metaphor Contest. Your usage of a slot machine is a great illustration of the 5k Contest being a crap shoot. You also provided a perfect commentary on gambling in that for the majority of participants the odds of winning (having their entry displayed) is exactly 0. Great work!

As you are just the second place winner, I thought you would be interested in being the first to learn about the winning entry. First place has been awarded to Toronto tallow plant worker Bob McKenzie. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Bob's entry was an epic novel. His animated GIF of a clock being thrown into a toilet and the toilet being flushed perfectly described the 5k Contest for many entrants. While the animation appears to play forever, the animation mysteriously stops when the flush counter displays 900.

A noteworthy (read: prizeless) entry was a feature length Quick Time presentation entitled, "Once Bitten". It was written and directed by none other than Spike Lee and narrated by Regis and Kathy Lee. (An unlikely trio, I know, but I think Spike and Kathy are related.) The docudrama chronicles the lives of 900 web developers during the weeks leading up to next year's 5k Contest. I didn't quite "get" this one as none of the people are working on a 5k entry, but I thought it was well done and interesting.

Another interesting, but hapless entry was submitted by Peter Pembroke, a Pennsylvannia postal worker. Pete didn't have much in the way of a metaphor for the 5k contest, but he does have quite an imagination. Pete's submission--perhaps manifesto is a better description--details 1) the preposterous idea of there being a connection between April Fool's Day and the 5k Contest entry deadline and 2) what he intends to do about it. I hope he doesn't own any firearms.

Please reply to this notice with your mailing address and your second place prize will be sent to you immediately.

Again, congratulations,
From All Of Us At The 5K Contest Metaphor Contest



And then there were a few more emails exchanged back and forth, culminating in the one excerpted below, which seemed to smooth everything out:


Date: Mon, 1 May 2000 10:42:29 +0100
To: The same person as before
From: Stewart Butterfield
Subject: Re: You are the second place winner!

I'm sure you meant it as subtle encouragement. Look, it's a contest; there was nothing in the original rules about giving ribbons for participation. The hours (at least some of them) weren't wasted: hundreds of people wrote in telling me what they learned in preparing their entries, how they were inspired to redesign their own or their company's site, how they enjoyed the act of creation. Not everyone can win; hopefully everyone enjoyed playing.

The entries that didn't get posted were terrible, or they would crash the browsers used to test them, or they just wouldn't work in the browsers in which they were tested (and part of the rules were: you can do whatever you want, but you take your chances by not knowing what configurations the judges are using) or -- and this is the important category -- they were really quite good, but not quite good enough to pass off to the judges for whatever reason -- these ones (perhaps 100 or so) will get posted in time. These would have been posted already, but as the deadline got near, it became clear that we couldn't post them all and still get done in time (and, as it happens, we aren't done in time anyway). The site is not going down any time soon; people will still see these entries. They were all reviewed though, most by more than one person.

I put in about 500 hours into this, and there were another 100+ hours put in by other volunteers. Corporate sponsorships were turned down, no banners were posted (even though it would have raked in about $10-40,000 by now). I actually had a nightmare about all the people who didn't get their work posted, and I am genuinely sorry *but there really wasn't anything else I could do*. I wasn't trying to be mean.

I know many people must be disappointed. But then many people who got their entries posted but who didn't win will be disappointed too. I'm sure that whoever comes in second will be disappointed. By putting up around 1/5 of the entries (including about 1/2 of the really good ones), we ended up doing more than is done in most contests (ever seen the 1,000 or so entries for the Hi5/ALA? The other few thousand nominees for the Webbies? Or the hundreds, thousands, whatever, for most short-fiction or screenwriting contests? Scholarship applications which didn't make it? All the little girls who didn't get to be Annie? Life is like that sometimes.




The bottom line? I wish they were all up already. I like them. I love it that so people got so into this, and I'm sorry that everyone doesn't get recognition for all the hard work they put in to their entries. There are some entries which haven't been posted which are better than some of the entries which did get posted, and they will be up there eventually.

If you really need to send nasty mail in, you can send it to nasty@sylloge.com, but at least try to make it clever ;)