All entries go live on the evening of May 19th and the contest ends at midnight Eastern Standard Time on June 9th. Prizes are awarded based on the performance of each entry over this three week period. For each winning entry, Eyebeam will award cash grants in the form of a check made out to the designated project leader. Eyebeam staff and members of the contagious media group will serve as judges in the event of a dispute and they are not permitted to enter the contest.

Got Questions? Email us at showdown@contagiousmedia.org and check out our FAQ

$2000 Grand Prize
The entry that receives the most unique visitors during the contest time period will be awarded the $2000 grand prize. Traffic statistics will be based on the server logs of the official contagious media showdown server.

$1000 Technorati Prize
The entry that receives the most blog links during the contest time period will be awarded the $1000 Technorati Prize. Link statistics will be determined by the number of blog links pointing to the entry on June 9th as recorded by Technorati.

$1000 Creative Commons Prize
The most popular entry under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike will be awarded the $1000 Creative Commons prize. Popularity will be measured by total number of unique visitors over the contest as measured by the server logs of the official contagious media showdown server.

$1000 Alexa Prize
The first entry to achieve a weekly averaged 20,000 or higher ranking on the Alexa tracking service will be awarded the $1000 Alexa prize in the form of an Amazon gift certificate. If no entry reaches this ranking the Amazon gift certificate will be donated to Eyebeam's artist in residence program. Note: To be eligible for the Alexa prize you must register your own fully qualified domain name and map it to your entry.



General Rules:

1) Your entry must be a new work.
The project must be created specifically for the Contagious Media Contest. You are not permitted to submit a pre-existing project or a project that already exists elsewhere on the web. Your project may incorporate preexisting materials, provided you modify or transform them enough to create a new work.

2) Your entry must be hosted on the official Contagious Media Contest server.
Eyebeam will provide 25MB of space for each contestant. Your entire project must reside on this server and use the resources provided by the server. Your entry can have its own domain name if it is mapped to the contagious server. See our FAQ for more specific info about the server itself.

2a) You must stick with our schedule.
You can develop your project at your own pace, but it shall be launched on May 19th. Traffic garnered before May 19th does not count in the judging of prizes.

3) Your entry must comply with Datagram's terms of use.
See http://www.datagram.com/acceptable.html for more details. Please refrain from submitting hardcore pornography or illegal content of any kind.

4) You own your entry. You retain all rights to your entry.
The content you submit is your sole responsibility. This means you can remove or transfer your entry at any time.

5) Stats generated by your entry will be public.
All stats generated during the duration of the contest will be owned by Eyebeam and made publicly available under a Creative Commons license.

6) One person, one entry.
You are only allowed to submit one entry per person. If you work in a group, you are permitted to submit as many entries as you have group members, up to a limit of 4 (four) total projects per group.

7) No ads, no bots, no scams.
You are permitted to promote your entry however you see fit, with three exceptions: You may not use paid advertisements, automated processes that fake traffic, or scams that produce traffic without people actually seeing your content. Most other stuff is fair game.

8) No paid work.
Your entry cannot advertise or market a commercial product. Viral marketing firms can enter the contest, but they may not submit paid work they are doing for a client.

9) Tweak all you want.
You will have full FTP access to your entry throughout the contest. Feel free to tweak, improve, or modify you entry throughout the contest.

10) Be Good.
The Eyebeam technical staff reserves the right to immediately remove and disqualify any entry that does not meet the contest rules or interferes with the integrity or spirit of the contest.

11) Free hosting.
Datagram is sponsoring the contest by providing free hosting from early May - July 15th. At the conclusion of the contest you will have the option of moving your site to a new server, taking your site off-line, or signing up for an account with Datagram.

12) Be creative

Got Questions? Email us at showdown@contagiousmedia.org and check out our FAQ