Times Cheltnam Twitter Competition

@edent — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:00:07 +0000

Update! Those wonderful, delightful, considerate, and fragrant smelling people at The Times have corrected their mistake. All is well with the world. This blog post is staying merely for #NaBloPoMo.

~~Rupert Murdoch and John Humphrys ⁠owe me £20! In protest, I'm going to quit listening to the Today programme until they pay up and apologise.~~

The Times has been running a literary competition:

Well, I like books, I like twitter, so I thought I'd enter with this little effort.

Pretty good, huh? Ten minutes later, Nathan Smale re-posted (not retweeted) my story.

To his credit, my story was a full 140 characters and he quickly followed it up with

No big deal, right? The Times published my story as one of their "Best Entries So Far".

They Got It Right The First Time

I was pretty happy and quietly confident that the £140 was mine. Well, my tweet won a runner-up prize! But The Times credited it to @nsmale - despite earlier crediting it to me!

Miscredited

Nathan Smale is, of course, blameless in all this. To his good credit he hasn't tried to snaffle my prize and has alerted The Times to their egregious mistake.

I guess it goes to show that the new Retweet Functionality is much needed.

I've tweeted and called The Times and I'll post any follow-up here.

Times Cheltnam Twitter Competition – Terence Eden’s Blog

Times Cheltnam Twitter Competition