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I dont think I can post my list of "achievements" now; not much could nail that as a personal achievement :) Kudos. By the way; how did you manage to fix the b

• buro9 17y ago
  You can probably guess how with some background info: It's 1998, this is the first Brit Award to allow internet voting. The voting is via a GET request, there is no cookie being set, no email address being collected... IP dupe checking is all they could be doing... but it's 1998 and every time you dial-up you get a new IP address. We had a majordomo mailing list of 25,000 fans, and all of the other nominees had either no internet presence at that point or nothing more than a single page that they didn't even update with news about the award nomination. Traditionally at that point the music industry used "phoners". Teams of paid people to phone up and rig an award. Pete Waterman had a good team, and it's a 2 week voting window. It took us a week to get rolling, but we did what you might expect with the info above and our mailing list. At the end of week 1 someone leaked to Pete Waterman that they were out in the lead. He attempted to save the money and laid off his phoners, at that point our campaign just got underway, and with that mailing list being mostly passionate students we accelerated past what the phoners had achieved. We only won by a small margin of a few thousand. But what mattered was the viral campaign and having Pete lay off the phoners. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, Pete was furious, but he just didn't really understand the internet and had been out-manoeuvred in a space he thought he knew intimately. We even made the front page of the Daily Record in Scotland :)