What a great time! I loved doing this little contest — we’ll have to do it again sometime, albeit with some lesser prize since World Series tickets are difficult to come by. We had just over 130 entrants in 2 1/2 days, so if you made it into the “hat” you managed to find some pretty good odds for this sort of thing. Relatively speaking, anyway.

So who won? Drum roll please….

The winner of the Dibs.net 2007 World Series Game 3 (oops not game 4) Ticket Giveway at Coors Field is “bells“, who writes:

Why do I love the Rockies? How about because I’ve been with them from the beginning, including going against my nature in voting to fund a ballpark in order to get the franchise. How about sitting in the old Mile-High and watching EY make history in the first-ever Rox home game? How about because it helps me bond with the biggest baseball fan I know, my five-year-old daughter (that’s her in my mugshot, engrossed in the game when she was a year-and-a-half old).

He’s also one of our few entrants who listed an item for sale on his personal domain bells.dibs.net, so if you need some some 29″ mountain bike wheels he’s your guy.

Congratulations bells!!!! I’ve sent an email to arrange for getting the tickets to you. Enjoy the game and scream GO ROCKIES on behalf of all of our contest entrants!

I’d like to thank “bells” along with every single one of you who entered. If you didn’t win, don’t feel bad. Keep your heads high and remember the Rockies need you rooting at home too! For your reading enjoyment, here are some of the our members and their profiles:
lobelover, jillcrum, scrapjunkie123, gorockies, Mike20000007, Chipdunninc, mmilner, atomtech, jeffreynix, Snowmonster, Buffalo, neildiamond, katiedulaw, tgordon, hollidayfan, dkmels, bluestoonz, cindygreenfield, dpearson, woodzurk, greene09, troy4roy, Angelislayer, starflrt, CentennialJim, colleengray, Rockies10, houseofpayne, speedzila, chaddar, johnthepainter, hiaspire, dudeindenver, flexflexerson, ryanbrothers, DomCasual, JeffH, psprowlls, ourstereo, nutmeg555, davspo12, rocksfan, wenwenti, Pattyjo15, circusgirl, zarl3346, squinn09, mxhess, DumbrangoRod, BLAKE20TH, troutfisher, rooting4rox, gallmj2, duckphreak, mstueve, DenverHannah, slack13, eltonbrand, denverSC, beepbeep, rockiesgerard, stacyrighini, Greenikes, kayapup, omegaking, dongreen26, ninewords, rockiesticketsmaybe, kpham, cabanaboy, mytphine, jlambo4, SallyRose, lunchbox8484, Groyyzone, dcedaria, jprohaus, BiggestMountainRoxFan, harrydunn81, bnkrocks, janeenoel, northernbird, northfacer, scanetto, quatroch, Resparza, kathleens, shaag81, IanRules, mrkorver, tobycollett, MazMan34, chronosoul, haggart, rhouse04, caseycline, rottielover, skitzo, kpekoz, tphrenic, Bidwak, bigstix22, realtorphil, bells, youngatheart, danielh41

Another day, another Rockies tickets giveaway update. The Treasure Map (that’s the blog you’re reading) has officially turned into a Rockies blog until the end of the Series. So be it.

Let’s see what’s cool on the Rockies interwebs:

• If you aren’t in the drawing yet for the two free World Series tickets I’m giving away, you still have about 24 hours (until noon Friday) to do so, so get on it!
• Yeah, the Rockies got clobbered last night. Francis and Morales lost their cool while Beckett put every pitch where he wanted. But here’s a great message to Rockies fans: don’t give up hope!
• Mike Keefe of the Denver Post has immortalized the Rockies ticket fiasco in today’s cartoon.
• Have you heard the song Underdog by Spoon? Give it a listen and let’s adopt it as our anthem!
  “You got no fear of the underdog, that’s why you will not survive!”

On the bright side for fans, last night’s rout might scare off some bandwagon ticket buyers and bring prices down. Hope so! That means it won’t hurt to keep an eye on StubHub’s listings.

Thanks to everyone who has already signed up for a chance to win Rockies World Series tickets!

There have been some fun and touching Rockies moments posted in new account profiles; I just wish I could give you all your own tickets. Here are some of my favorites so far:

• gallmj2 tells of a years’ old heartache brought on by a missed Rockies opportunity in 3rd grade.
• tphrenic tries to downplay the family dysfunction that happens when a Rockies fan’s 75-year-old father is a Red Sox fan.
• denverSC remembers the crack of EY’s bat at the first game at Coors Field.
• troutfisher gives a shout out to Purple Row, “the best Rockies blog around.”
• davspo12’s shaky faith in God might just be restored by a couple of Rockies tickets.
• houseofpayne actually authored an original Rockies haiku. Take that

I haven’t been able to read enough. But I will — even though it has nothing to do with the outcome of the drawing, I love hearing your Rockies moments and what they have meant to you over the years!

UPDATE 12:30 PM Friday: We have a winner!

UPDATE 12:00 (NOON) Friday: The deadline to enter has passed. I’m allowing a few minutes for the last few signups to write up a profile message. Stay tuned for the winner to be announced at 1:00! GO ROCKS!

Dibs has two tickets to Game 3 of the World Series, which takes place this Saturday in Denver. If you had trouble with the finicky ticketing system and couldn’t snag any tickets, this is a great chance at the hottest tickets in town and your opportunity to root-root-root for the Rox as they attempt to sweep the Sox under the rug!

And get this:
you don’t pay scalper prices,
or even face value –
we’re giving ‘em away!

All you have to do to enter is:

1. Go to the main page and sign up for a Dibs account between now and Friday at noon. What does a Dibs account do for you? Read all about us to find out more.
2. Place a note in your Dibs account profile describing why you love the Rockies.
3. (Optional) Post some stuff for sale in your neighborhood.

On Friday at 1:00 PM I will randomly pick one lucky winner from a virtual hat. If you win, you will be contacted via email and your personalized Dibs site will be showcased here (if you have listed anything for sale).

What is this? Some ruse to collect email addresses? No way! Please read our privacy policy. Short version: we despise spammers and the spam they rode in on. You won’t hear from us unless you want to — or you win the tickets.

Rules and notes (some of these are pretty important):

• Eligible accounts must be created and email confirmed between 10/24/2007 12:01AM and 10/26/2007 12:00PM.
• Winner will receive tickets for two (2) seats to Game 3 of the World Series in Denver, Colorado on October 27th. The tickets are in right field, upper level (section 303 row 25).
• Travel, fees, parking, and any other costs are not included.
• Winner will be contacted at the email address registered within the winning account.
• Winner must respond within 6 hours of being contacted or a new winner will be drawn.
• Tickets will be left at will-call under your name on day of game.
• Not responsible for misrouted or spam-filtered email, registration problems, or other technical issues.
• Not responsible for weather, game cancellations, refunds, lost tickets, acts of God or anything else some sleazy, trolling late-night-advertising lawyer might try to pin on us.
• Friends & family of Dibs are not eligible.
• Posting for-sale listings in your account does not affect chances of winning tickets.
• One account per person. If you sign up for multiple accounts, prepare to be disqualified from this contest. Signing up with multiple email addresses won’t fool us.
• Eligibility and disqualification is at the full discretion of Dibs management; all decisions are final.
• Accounts must follow the Terms of Service of the Dibs site or may be terminated, deleted, and/or disqualified from this contest.
• All times in this post are Mountain Time.
• Rockies and MLB are not affiliated with, nor endorse Dibs or this contest.

Summer has ended and that means back to school go the kids, back to the TV go the football games, and back to the playoffs (after 12 years) go the Colorado Rockies! Even if you’re not into baseball, surely you can appreciate a team who had to win 14 of their final 15 games to make the playoffs.

The update I rolled out tonight includes more improvements to the back-end than on the visible side of things. The big added feature is the ability to subscribe to any search with RSS using a blog reader like Google Reader or Bloglines. Just copy the aptly named “Subscribe to this search” link and paste it into your blog reader. Voilà!

I’ve also improved the map slightly in that it scrolls with the page; and, somewhat related, upon re-centering or zooming, the search results are updated much more quickly. Another slight improvement deals with search URLs, which now have a location embedded in them so they indicate clearly where they are searching — before there was a little bit of magic.

Most other changes deal with testing or improving search engine friendliness, which will hopefully drive more traffic here.

Finally, if you’re a techie, you might find it interesting that Dibs is now running on the Rails 2.0 Prerelease, just a couple of days after its announcement. It’s not as risky as it sounds — it’s been running on a July development version for some time already.

There are some other exciting things in store, so stay tuned!

No, I’m not there. But Dibs.net is on the scene at Black Rock City, Nevada! Or at least, it’s there in some ethereal sense: I added Black Rock City to the system (did you know Google Maps doesn’t have a clue where it is?) so folks can post and search for stuff to trade all week long.

I’m also offering to add specific camps to the system if people will send me GPS coordinates for them, so you’d be able to quickly see what stuff is at which camp.

I very much support Burning Man and the ideas behind it. In fact, I think the goals of Dibs.net are pretty well inline with the goals of the event, and so I am hoping folks on scene will find Dibs.net useful for advertising their camp’s extra supplies and facilitating the barter system there.

Of course, Dibs.net is based around offers of money back here in the regular world, but there’s nothing to prevent people from posting things for $0, and others making offers other than money. It’s built right into the system.

And as always, Dibs.net is entirely free and non-commercial. Have at it, Burners!

We experienced some downtime this morning, approximately 7:00-9:30 AM PDT. Some of the dibs.net servers unexpectedly rebooted (something that you have to plan for in an environment like Amazon EC2). The outage would have been quite a bit shorter except for another problem that surfaced during startup, causing some services to not come back online automatically.

Unfortunately, until Amazon offers the ability to float an IP address, this sort of outage can hit any web application hosted on EC2. For the time being, however, fixing the startup scripts to decrease any outages should be sufficient for these early days of dibs.net.

(On this date in 1950, Gary Larson — cartoonist of The Far Side — was born.)

With all the activity around launch, promotion and marketing, I’ve only been able to accomplish a few things over the last week or so. Besides cleaning out several smaller bugs, tonight’s update addresses one area I think has been causing an initial WTF reaction when people first visit. For various reasons, all activities on the site have required login, and therefore, an account. So, when people land on the site and click nearly anything (Ask a Question, Make an Offer, etc.), they are prompted to login or create an account. Ugh… so rude. It’s time to let them do more.
The first step in resolving this is a feature I call Non-Member Questions. It works almost exactly the same as regular questions, except that:

• the user doesn’t need an account, and
• before the question is sent to the seller to be answered, the person who posted it has to confirm their email address.

Non-member questions are anonymous. (The seller cannot see their email address.) They are always public.

This can be enabled or disabled on a per-listing basis, and is currently disabled for all existing items in the system. To enable it, simply go to an item’s Edit Details page, check the box and save:

After I give this some time and any issues are resolved, the next step will be to allow non-member’s to make offers, which is a far bigger deal.
My goal with these non-member features is to make the site more attractive and usable before everyone in the world has an account. It’s all about effectively managing the communications between buyer & seller, and I think this is a step in the right direction.

Thanks a million to everyone I met and talked with and who would listen to my spiel about dibs.net at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup tonight. As I was driving to DLA Piper this evening, I decided this was going to be my “P.T. Barnum” moment if I’m ever going to have one. (Not the “sucker was born every minute” P.T. Barnum, but the “extraordinary promoter” P.T. Barnum.) If you weren’t there, you missed a fun night: I gave $10 on the spot to everyone who would post something for sale within a couple weeks. And it’s not like I’m checking up on whether you follow though; no other strings attached. You win by getting a free lunch and dibs.net wins by spending ad money more wisely than Google ads. We all win by finding a better owner for the unused clutter that has collected in our lives.

The giveaway was a great hit and I had a blast talking to everyone and meeting so many interesting people so full of ideas. Tonight really made me remember why I moved here. There is so much enthusiasm and creativity around “ideas” here that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Sure, we all engage in a little wild-eyed hyperbole at these events, but I’d rather converse with a dreamer for a month than a closed-eyed cynic for a minute.

By the way, I took a small break from dibs.net development over the past few days to get the marketing machine rolling. Now that it’s set in motion, it’s back to some much needed features that should let more users participate here.

By the way, here’s a Truemor for ya: Guy Kawasaki didn’t ask me about the $10 I was giving away. Either he doesn’t need lunch money tomorrow or he’s got no stuff to sell It was great to finally see him, after missing out on the talk he did for an SVASE event last September.

Another Truemor: Guy spent $15k building Truemors? So much money! Dibs cost me $6k and that includes a $2400 iMac. Slap another star up the fridge baby, we’re going to celebrate at Red Lobster tonight!

(On this date in 1954, Ardito Desio’s expedition became the first to summit K2, the world’s second tallest mountain.)

Today’s update (and the few smaller ones since the last update) brings a ton of new features, stability improvements and bug fixes. I’m not going to list them all, but one of the big ones addresses some problems I found with the photo viewer. That’s a pretty important area, so I spent a bit of energy on making sure it works really well. Now it’s a nice Flash component which will degrade to plain ol’ HTML should Flash not be available. So this ought to work well for nearly everyone.

I’m really happy with how this first release of Dibs turned out. It’s got everything I had planned, plus a few other great features. So, since everything looks stable, I’m starting to sell my own stuff on my personal site, kevin.dibs.net. You’re welcome to sign up and start buying and selling, too!

And don’t forget to subscribe to The Treasure Map’s RSS feed. I will be announcing some fun “scavenger hunt” style events soon. Leave a comment to tell me what kinds of prizes I should give away!