We like the odds! Fingers crossed.

I second Doug’s analysis – both of those metrics are easily influenced. Be careful before you use them to judge actual favorites. (I have a feeling that highest ranked just means they got more of their friends/supporters to vote 5 than the other projects ;))

I’ve probably spent an inordinate amount of time pondering the significance of the News Challenge rating system. A few thoughts / observations:

A few of the highly rated applications from the first round did not make it to round two.

It would be interesting to see the rating distribution as well as the average. I’d be willing to bet that for most applications with more than 20 ratings, the vast majority of votes would either be 1 or 5. In the first round, when our application made it to the first page of most highly rated applications, we swiftly went from a high 4 to a low 3. I knew approximately how the vote count increased and, doing the math, it was apparent that most of the new votes were 1. My point is that the votes are an average of the 5 star votes sourced by supporters and the 1 star (or other low votes) provided by other applicants and supporters of other projects. Please note that I’m not saying that the overall rating is a bad indicator of success. Maintaining a high rating does indicate a very strong support base. It would also be very interesting to see how the high and low ratings are dispersed geographically.

The Knight Foundation indicated that the ratings do not impact on an application’s prospects for success. However, if I were a reviewer, I’d at least be curious. That said, I did promote our first round application but have not promoted our second round application. If you’re speculation is right, I’m really going to regret that decision! During the first round, I found myself providing more tech support for the News Challenge rating process than for our own website.

Up until mid last week, a few reviewer comments were showing on the individual application pages, either directly above the application or directly below. While most were only comprised of the reviewers initials, there were some that contained a few comments – either in support of the application or against. These brief comments did not seem to correlate with the ratings or page views. In fact, I was surprised that some of the positive comments were on proposals that I would never have suspected would be favorites.

There a lot of good proposals in the mix and it will be interesting to see what’s left after the next round of cuts. Of course, I hope that short list includes Nation of Neighbors. If it doesn’t, we’ll still be better off for having gone through the process.