Rory Fitzpatrick Finishes 3rd in All-Star Balloting

550,177 votes a record for write-in candidate

In a testament to the power of fans on the internet, Vancouver Canucks defenseman Rory Fitzpatrick as a write-in candidate received 550,177 votes but finished third in the contest for the two starting Western Conference defenseman for the 2007 NHL All-Star game scheduled for January 24 in Dallas.  Fitzpatrick was just 22,892 votes out of a starting spot, and just 41,500 votes behind first place This blog has contained comprehensive coverage of the Rory Fitzpatrick campaign. As of the release of week 6 voting results, Rory was 35,000 votes behind, but his 64,000 votes in the final week were not enough to close the gap

Media and blog coverage

Coverage of the Rory campaign mushroomed quickly after the campaign kicked off November 19. From November 20-January 12, I’ve catalogued with direct links 119 stories and links to audio and video coverage of the phenomenon, and 278 blog posts.

Technorati has generated a neat updating graph that shows blog posts that mention Rory Fitzpatrick for the last 60 days.

and that mention the NHL All-Star game in the last 60 days.
 

The HF Boards

The campaign jumpstarted on November 19 with a thread started by Sabres fan Steve Schmid on HFBoards. By January 12 there were 13 discussion threads there with a total of 11,973 posts and 368,738 views. Another good Rory discussion thread is at the official Canucks.com message board, which as of January 8 had 1,757 posts and 57,940 views. Of course, there is also the original Something Awful thread, which as of January 13 has 1722 posts and 66,042 page views

VoteForRory.com

Steve Schmid’s website VoteForRory has great links on the left side of his page to YouTube videos, and the Facebook and MySpace groups devoted to the campaign. Check it out. By the end of voting on January 2, the site had received over 339,000 hits, and had climbed over 375,000 hits by January12.

Facebook and MySpace

As of January 2, 2007, a Facebook.com campaign group with 4,576 members and a MySpace.com group with 727 members were actively supporting the Rory campaign.

Rory on YouTube

 As of January 10, there were 31 different Rory Fitzpatrick videos up at YouTube, the most famous being two satirical attack ads posted December 10, one focused on Nicklas Lidstrom and viewed 44,256 times, and the other focused on Scott Niedermeyer and viewed 47,075 times.