Anyone who frequents Lenzr in August 2010 will notice there are some new developments, in addition to four new photo contests.

The photography challenges end October 1st, 2010 and there’ll be a whole lot more good information about them on this blog in the immediate future. The changes to the voting protocols on the website are permanent.

The new Lenzr voting protocol promises to level the playing field and ramp up the excitement.  Now each photographer’s pictures will be on display only, until there are just ten days left in the contest. When the countdown ends, the time to vote begins! This upgrade should make each contest 2x more exciting, and 100% more fair.

In the past we’ve  had problems keeping the contests fair.  Lenzr is still evolving and we discovered over time that the contests were set up to favour early adopters. Users that were the first to upload pictures always had a much better chance of winning because of the volume of members and voting visitors that saw their pictures first and any vote no matter how small helps each photo.

This idea for a countdown mechanism came to  us from a member that emailed suggestions to help improve the overall Lenzr user experience.  Fortunately, when we hear a good idea we jump on it – six months later!  This update is long overdue but is expected to radically improve the overall fairness of the competition, and the overall user experience.

Lenzr hopes to create a photography competition that is fair and equal for everyone involved. There is no question that the best photo should win, but quality is subjective – what might be considered beautiful by some users may be hideously ugly and unprofessional to others. So its only when we can poll the masses and take the mean averages that admiration can be properly quantified to determine the preferences of the voting population.

INSIGHT – in the next upgrade there will be a coupon distribution mechanism added to incentivize Lenzr members to vote on images.

Readers of this blog, photographers, Lenzr members and friends know that this website is a work in progress. We are starting something here, and with bold intentions we are trying to perfect a mechanism that efficiently ‘harnesses business to make art’.  Already the success of our enterprise has proven that buzz marketing attached to a photo contest is a healthy way for any company and especially local business to tell consumers the specifics of their offering and share branded content and user submitted photo genius through an expanding social network.

But all is not perfect. There are problems that need to be remedied and the biggest issue seems to be the manner by which the winning photo is selected.

As you know on Lenzr, there are two qualities of votes. To encourage more participation, we have opted to have a popular vote that does not require registration, and yet we have a registered vote that is more powerful.  In the last set-up the registered vote was worth five times more than a popular vote.  In the new equation it will be worth 10x more than a popular vote, and members will have to have uploaded a photo before they can cast a registered vote. Newly registered members that have not uploaded a photo or if their photo has been deleted, will find their registered votes actively or retroactively rescinded into popular votes.

Another factor is the number of votes, and this is where we went wrong last contest period. The weight was too high and the members who uploaded their images first received the lion’s share of audience participation and won by sheer volume of votes, both low and high scores.  In the new algorithm, the # of votes will still count, but only be worth half as much.

Slimmswitch wrote us an email last week and said,  “Maybe another suggestion would be to allow both the registered user and anonymous user to only be able to vote on one photo per day as opposed to every photo? as people might get others to vote a terrible score on every other photo.  I think this would make voting more accurate as people will be forced to vote more honestly.” Our response: Although we agree that limiting the # of votes per day would force people to be selective and discriminating, we think it would be too limiting, and severely affect participation numbers, which is a metric intricately connected to our sponsorship sales efforts.

# of Comments Here at Lenzr we have decided to add another variable to our increasingly complex formula. Now we are adding # of comments to the equation. Each comment will be considered a positive addition to the photo selection metrics.

SUMMARY of the new LENZR SCORING ALGORITHM

The winning photo on Lenzr will now be selected by a combination of Registered Votes and Popular votes, whereby Registered Votes are worth 10x more than Popular Votes. The total numbers of votes each photo receives will be halved and this amount added to the equation.  And finally the # of comments will collected and added to the scoring with each comment being worth one perfect or 10/10 registered vote.

Lets try that, and see where we are in sixty days. Your feedback is appreciated.