Saturday, August 8, 2009

Preparing for the countdown

The past 3+ weeks have been an absolutely wonderful experience, both because I love women's music (more than I would have guessed - the more I hear, the more I love!), and because I love spreadsheets! I've been compiling votes, and watching with interests as songs skyrocket up and down the chart. Here are some things to be aware of before you start viewing the results.

  1. There are a lot of songs which have the same number of votes, meaning that they're tied. So this countdown doesn't have 1 song in position 100, 1 in position 99, etc. Instead, it's more like 10 songs in positions 90-100.
  2. I am quite a shy person, so there's no way in hell I could bring myself to do podcasts or vodcasts for this countdown. I'm better with the written word. So, I'm publishing the results by blog.
  3. This was 99.9% a one-woman operation. So, I'm limited with the amount of research I could get done (even with the help of some wonderful people on Twitter and off), and the amount of data validation I could achieve. So, some song names will be incorrect - perhaps it's "Gimme yo' money", and I've written it as "Give Me Your Money". Sorry about that. Same goes for artist/band names. I've written it as "Pink", not "P!nk". You may just have to deal with it!
  4. I've tried to get the best versions of songs that I could in YouTube. I may not have included your favourite version, or a version from another site. Please feel free to add a comment with the URL of the version you would have included.
  5. Comments are on. Go crazy, have a blast. Sexist, racist, generally offensive comments will be REMOVED. This is supposed to be a positive, feminist, inclusive, open, honest, joyous celebration of women's music - NOT an opportunity to debate whether this poll should have gone ahead at all.
  6. I didn't restrict people to only 10 votes because that would have been hard to police. Let's say you write a Facebook post requesting 11 songs. Well, which one should I remove? So I write to you to ask you to nominate one to remove. You never write back. Okay, that's 10 votes I've lost. Meanwhile, that's a hell of a lot more administration for me to do. It just wasn't realistic. If I had written a survey at Surveymonkey, for example, restricting people to just 10 songs, I would have had less people participating - the more you make people click to get to where you want them to go, the less likely they are to arrive there.

I think that's it. Any other questions, please write them in the comments and I will respond.

6 comments:

  1. I'm looking forward to it! Thanks for putting in so much hard work.

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  2. Thank you for all the work that you've done, both in raising awareness and in doing the administration of the poll.

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  3. Yeah, thanks for all your hard work Naomi, and for actually taking the initiative to do something positive in response to the warped JJJ results. For me, this has become a way more exciting and meaningful countdown. Can't wait to see the list!

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  4. Thank you for doing this! So many talented women in the results! *happy sigh* If you ever want to do it as a podcast or whatever, I'm happy to lend my voice. I'm a talkative attention beast.

    http://www.youtube.com/user/napalmnacey if you're interested.

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