Link Details

It appears that the same exact people are voting for *all* GridGain links and *nothing* else. For me, the second part is much more important than the first one.

Think about the time you did waste looking for smth interesting to vote (up or down) and do smth useful instead. :)

I've noticed the same thing. The GridGain articles are practically like spam on DZone. It's so obvious they are gaming the system. I suppose the only thing that can be done is to run the DZone feed through Yahoo Pipes and filter the spam.

We replied to this kind of remarks before. What is wrong with GridGain developers voting on articles about the product they developed? Wouldn't you vote for the product you worked on?

By the way, most of GridGain folks love to read DZone and frequently vote for other articles as well (I do admit that some do it more than others).

Best.

No, I wouldn't vote for just any blog article only because it was related to a product I had worked on. I like DZone because, most of the time, the community-based article promotion is a decent collaborative filter for identifying useful information. It's not perfect and unfortunately there are loopholes for groups of people to game the system. I hope this type of link manipulation doesn't become widespread because it would make DZone much less beneficial to many people.

I'm always looking for grid computing topics. It appears that it's only GridGain-related with rare exceptions... Hence, the voting.

Guys,
I'm going to create a template for answering this question :-) No spamming here. We blog about our project and blogs get posted on DZone. Everybody on our team votes for it - which is absolutely natural, we want our project to get known to more and more people. There are very few posts on DZone on distributed programming or grid computing - and unlike many we do read before we vote up and down and we read only what is interesting to us - that explains why we don't vote on many other topics.

Best.

As long as the templates go... The pattern is this:
1. You blog about the project - no problem (even if it's a filler to just keep the post frequency up)
2. You or another team member adds a link to DZone. I don't recollect any other dzone user submitting the stories from your blog to dzone. An interesting experiment for you would be to wait for a day to see if anybody from outside your project submits that entry. If nobody does it - oh well, it wasn't so interesting to begin with.
3. In a few minutes, all your team members vote the story up. Looking at the history of those users, i see *only* votes for these links. No voting (up or down) on other stories, no comments, no submittal of other content. This has changed a little since my first comment on this entry.

Now, there are no problems in "clique" voting when you like entries of the specific person. However, if that is the only interest of that clique, it reflects very poorly on the clique members, postings and the project itself. It might even be perceived as link spamming.

If you are confident that others have the same level of interest in these GridGain posts (especially marketing posts like this one) then I challenge you to allow other people besides the GridGain team members make that choice for awhile and see how many of your posts reach the DZone front page. It also wouldn't be so annoying (and you wouldn't need your response template) if you and your team weren't doing this so often.

Sincerely.

Guys,
Get a life :-)
90% of the content on DZone is posted by bloid (that's about community comment). We post what we like and how we like. Project team has RSS (ever heard of it :-) and they see posts right away voting them up (of course).

Don't like it - filter it our and don't read it. But stop whining, please...

Best.

So, apparently the challenge was a little too much. I thought it would provide some useful empirical marketing information, but you'd rather toss some insults instead.

You can post what you like. We can provide constructive criticism about the usefulness of those posts and share our thoughts about the practice of link spamming. You can interpret that feedback as whining and ignore it. We can continue to give feedback (or filter it or not read it or whatever). We all can do what we want.

Given your company's revenues are from professional services, I'd think you'd care more about the image of yourself and your people.

Good luck.

We have plenty of empirical marketing information and challenge ourselves on something slightly different than blogs cross-linking and forum posts :)

I am taking all feedback seriously - positive or negative when it relates to the project. Blogging is a different matter and I'm taking it much lighter. Once again, get a life and don't get worked out so much on someone else's blog. Take a look at the GridGain project instead and apply the same sharp eye on the design, features, APIs, documentation - that will be a huge help to community.

Best,
Nikita Ivanov.