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.

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!

Today’s update, which I hope is less controversial than the major leaguer whose birthday is today, brings some needed improvements to the posting process, with helpful steps along the draft -> upload photos -> publish path. It looks great and works great; I’m really happy with the improved usability.

The other major change addresses message functionality. Mainly, viewing all messages related to an item is much, much nicer — but there were a pile of smaller improvements here, especially focusing on organization and navigation. Also, messages now get chunked off in an email: since messages can’t be sent until an offer is accepted, this is one area where dibs.net reduces email volume.

All of these recent changes have made dibs.net a solid and feature-full app. After one or two more solid days of bug fixes and testing, I think I’ll be ready to slow down the release cycle and begin the maiden voyage with a local sale.

Things are looking great so far. I really appreciate all of the feedback I’ve gotten already. There were far fewer critical bugs than expected, which I like to think reflects well on my development skill.

Some small changes on dibs.net tonight include:

• Major changes to registration — should be a less error-prone process now
• Big update to profiles — now allows a note from the user
• Emails are less likely to be flagged as spam
• Image uploads are fixed
• Menu links are slightly changed/fixed
• Better promotion of the “vanity domains” feature, e.g., http://kevin.dibs.net
•  A couple backend fixes

I’d also like to say thanks to my Mom for her feedback today

I’ll be rolling out nightly bug fixes for the rest of the week. Send feedback and problems to support@dibs.net, motivating and congratulatory personal notes to kevin@centropy.com, beer and pizza to my home address.

After a burst of effort and very little sleep this weekend, dibs.net began its life as of about 3pm yesterday. Of course, it will be of marginal use until there are listings, so go forth and sell!

What’s dibs.net? At its core dibs.net is an online, regional classifieds site for non-commercial buyers and sellers. But that’s a boring description, because “classifieds” doesn’t even begin to describe what we do. Visit about dibs.net to learn more about how it works.

Here is a limited list of what is implemented at the moment.

• Geographic-aware searching and intelligent defaults
• Full-text searching
• Faceted drill-down searching by category or price
• Browse by category
• Vanity domains automatically restrict search and browse to a specific user
• Unlimited images per item and a nifty JS image viewer to display them
• Hierarchical categories
• Safe HTML item descriptions and a WYSIWYG description editor
• Upload a profile photo
• Ask and answer public or private questions about an item
• Make and accept/reject time-limited offers. (In addition, there are ways to “undo” rejection of offers, void an accepted offer.)
• Send messages to members you’re doing business with.

I also have big plans for the future, including:

• Branded vanity sites
• RSS feeds
• Saved searches
• Community groups
• Additional item characteristics (more drilldown fields)
• Localization to other languages

If you notice any problems, please open a ticket on support.dibs.net.

I uncovered a few critical bugs and deployment issues while attempting to get dibs.net online this past weekend. As a result, I begrudgingly decided to delay the launch until this coming weekend. It will be another frantic, work-filled weekend, but that’s how it goes.

As I re-roll frequent fixes onto the site over Saturday and Sunday, service will be spotty. By Monday I plan to shift to daily releases to hit any big bugs that appear. I would recommend waiting a week or so before relying on the site for anything important.

Wish me luck… launching is only the first step, of course. Attracting and building the community will be the next challenge after dibs.net exists.