notforprophet

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"I Won the Xanga Sweepstakes Laptop!!!!!!"

Well, someone gets to make that claim today!

According to the Xang-gods: "The winners will be selected in a random drawing from among all eligible entries by March 1, 2001, to be conducted by Xanga designated judges, whose decisions are final."

Wait a minute--winners? I thought they were only giving away one laptop! Nevertheless...

When will we know who won?

According to the Xang-gods: "The Grand Prize winner will be posted at www.xanga.com by March 2, 2001."

So come on back now, ya hear!

And what are the odds of winning?

According to the Xang-gods: "Grand Prize: Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop computer. Total Value: approximately $1,500. Xanga reserves the right to substitute the Grand Prize described herein for a similar laptop of equal or greater value. Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received."

Well, since according to these Xang-gods: "Earn 1 entry for joining + 5 entries for everyone you refer to Xanga.", then by all odds Bianca should win!!! HA! HA! Most of us are her nympholepts led here by her spritely seductions from GeoCities!

But seriously, I thought of trying to calculate the odds just based on Xangan membership alone without the 5 bonus entry provision, but it seems that is no longer possible!

About a week ago, Xanga changed the search engine. It now longer allows for a complete perusal of all members as was possible when you could search all names alphabetically beginning with any and every letter of the alphabet. Rather, now you are only able to get filtered views which, statistically speaking, are non-exhaustive and non-exclusive of each other. What this means is that it is no longer possible for us to compute the total membership accurately! You might say: so what? But I had been doing so privately, collecting data points to track membership trends, which I was going to publish at some point when enough data over time had been collected. I guess Xanga just doesn't want to worry or alarm us with numbers! Who needs to know how many of us there are? Be assured there are millions!!!

Yet, the current search mechanism does allow for some trend tracking. Below are the graphic results of recent post activity by gender over the last week and the last two weeks. I didn't delve back further than that since I consider someone who hasn't posted in two weeks not to be *active*. At my last count in mid-January, there were over 2,500 members. So even by that dated count (which is no longer possible to update), there appear to be at least 1,800 non-active (no new posts in last two weeks) members! Maybe Xanga should have given the laptop away on the basis of the frequency of posts and not mere membership or recommended memberships. That way, those active among us--who can use that laptop for doing this--would have had a better chance of winning!

Oh well, we'll see: Probably one of the Xang-gods' girlfriends will end up with the laptop anyways!

Yes, men, we appear to be a minority here in Xanga-Amazonia!