11/23/2009 02:37:48 PM 
(1) 
(1) While most of the categories seem to be running kinda OK, taking a look at the small agency category and you can to tell things are not quite right, but the small shops are not the worst offenders.
Hardly surprising, but those digital agencies have gotten crazy with power and manipulated the results to such an extreme that a couple of agencies have well over 40,000 votes. I doubt there are more than 40,000 people who ever heard of these shops, let alone prepared to vote for them as digital agency of the decade.
While it's fun to laugh at the inside joke of agencies trying to scam a win through slightly unethical means, it raises a couple of questions about the crowd.
1. Just how much do we trust the crowd?
2. Don't they always have the potential to get out of control?
3. Can we rely on them?
Anyone looking to use the crowd ought to be consider these questions and plan accordingly. Failure to understand this and to be able to implement measures to manage trust and control and you could be in serious trouble. It seems like common sense, but sometimes we are just a little too trusting.
Posted by Ed Cotton
It appears you don't have Flash installed.
the crowd is trustworthy, anything has the potential to get out of control, and the crowd is reliable. the problems, as you point out in the final paragraph, are with our methods of polling the crowd.