Seed inhospitable host to contest entrants

First, a rant. I am miffed at editors of Seed Magazine for their thoughtless handling of the Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest. They announced this contest in their spring issue and I—being an avid essay writer—submitted an entry. The question [sic] posed was: "What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century? How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?"

Is it wrong to expect the hosts of this contest to, at a minimum, acknowledge the receipt of an entry? Is it too much to ask that entrants be notified in advance of publication whether they made the cut? How about at least a mention in the article itself of the number of entries; perhaps even some kind of geographical breakdown? Is that so wrong?? What's worse is that Seed does not even offer a Letters to the Editor feature for subscribers and outside readers to voice their opinions.

I shouldn't be so surprised. After all, I received the same kind of brush off when I responded to a Seed Media position posting for a Life Sciences Editor nearly one year ago to this day. How's this for an opening?

Dear Seed Media,

Greetings. I am a fellow scientist, author, and editor who shares the vision of global science literacy. I have been following your company's Web presence over the past several months and waiting for this opportunity to connect. Your advertised opening for Life Sciences Editor is the perfect opportunity to introduce myself.

And did I get a reply? Nope. No ack whatsoever.

Hence, I say to Seed founder & CEO Adam Bly, "Shame on you, sir, for neglecting your audience. Your glossy pages may be beautiful and informative, but they now leave me cold." I am seriously reconsidering my subscription renewal.

***

Whew. Just had to get that off my chest. Now, another important accomplishment today was to yank this blog from its original .Mac platform and establish it at my new host, Google's Blogger. Why did I relocate when my blog isn't even a week old? Wait... I feel another rant coming on...

Boo to Apple's iWeb for completely preventing hack HTML coders like myself to add or change anything that is not pre-programmed in version 1.1.2 (the version that came with my July 2007 MacBook Pro). I became so very frustrated trying to add a simple little piece of code to my site today. As I was looking around for some help, I happenstanced upon this little gem of a Google gadget. It didn't take long at all to create a blog, set up a profile, and transfer everything over. I'm so glad I did! This is so much more professional and coder-friendly.
Don't you just Google?