The winner is Kelly and the prize is… gone?
Before Christmas LibraryThing annouced a prize competition for uClassify integration, which I think was a brilliant idea. They wrote:
The Prize! So, LibraryThing calls on the book and library worlds to create something cool with uClassify by February 1, 2009 and post it here. The winner gets Toby Segaran’s Programming Collective Intelligence and a $100 gift certificate to Amazon or IndieBound.
Encouraged by this Kelly Vista entered the competition and submitted his contribution, a classifier that he describes in a comment on LibraryThing:
My goal was to create a classifier that would automatically “tag” any book description based on actual LibraryThing tags. For example, if you paste the book description for “Truman” into UClassify, it should return to you LibraryThing tags that suit the book. This is one step more general than one of your ideas (fiction vs. non-fiction).
The classifier has been published and can be tested here.
Where did the prize go?
I just received a comment from Kelly describing that apparently he was the only competition participant. Also Tim from LibraryThing acknowledged Kelly as the winner per e-mail. However Kevin never received the prestigious prize or even a follow up blog post. Kelly writes in the comment:
Unfortunately, the odd folks at LibraryThing decided to get all silent on me and I have not heard a peep from anyone since. In the meantime, they have found plenty of time to blog about other things. I spent 4-6 hours of my weekend time (which I could have spent with family) participating in the contest, assuming they were decent Internet citizens. And I won (as I mentioned, Tim e-mailed me so) — but then they never got back to me, not after repeated pings, and as a result, I was never awarded the prize they promised.
Tim, what happened here? 
Tags: competition, LibraryThing, uclassify
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February 22nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Hey Jon,
Thanks for helping me get the word out! Again, I want to emphasize that this is nothing personal, I would just like people to finish what they start. For the record, here is the e-mail I received from Tim, on Feb 2nd: On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Tim Spalding wrote:
> Hey. Sorry. You won, believe me. I have about two pages of emails to
> go through before I can do anything about it. [rest of excuse deleted]
He’s apologizing here because I didn’t get any kind of acknowledgment when I first entered. After getting this e-mail, I was hopeful. Unfortunately, silent treatment ever since…
Thanks again Jon and, if nothing else, I am glad that I got to experiment with uClassify in the process. Great service!
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:17 am
http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2009/02/uclassify-contest-winner.php
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:17 pm
An update: Got an e-mail from Tim, with the prize. Thanks Tim and thanks Jon for helping me to resolve this! I appreciate it very much.