And the winners of the much hyped New Seven Wonders of the World are: The Great Wall of China, the ancient city of Petra, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal and... the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. Huh! Somehow I suspect that the majority of votes for the latter probably originated in Brazil. Some of the notable exceptions to the list include the Eiffel Tour and the Acropolis. The Taj Mahal, which at one stage wasn't even in the running just needed a little last-minute publicity push to get it onto the list.

This competition to find the new Wonders amounts to little more than a farce, highlighting the problem with Internet polling. There was absolutely nothing to stop people from voting multiple times. Furthermore, countries such as China (population 1,298,847,000), India (pop. 1,065,000,000), and Brazil (pop. 184,100,000) have an overwhelming advantage over countries with more modest populations. In fact, at one stage the Great Wall of China had the same number of votes as the Dublin Spire until there was a nation-wide drive in China to increase the number of votes. In the space of only 20 days the Great Wall had moved from 32nd up to 1st. That the Dublin Spire was so far up the list just shows how big of a joke all this really is. Mass email forwarding ensured that the Spire made the preliminary list but couldn't help the "Stiletto in the Ghetto" didn't quite reach the glorious heights of the Wolfe Tones' "A nation once again", which managed to beat out the classic Hindi hit Vande Mataram in the BBC's "World's Most Popular Song" contest. And just when everyone thought that the Eurovision Song Contest couldn't get any worse it did just that by opening the competition to online voting.

Ronnie O'Brien who had been signed as a rookie by Juventus amazingly shot up to the top of an internet poll to find Juve's most promising star of the future. If this wasn't enough the former shop shelver found himself at the top of a Time Magazine poll to find the Person of the Century. That was before the magazine decided to prevent this Bray lad from being one of the candidates because of his largely unknown status. Before long emails were forwarded around all four corners of Ireland encouraging people to vote for Ireland's iconic turkey - Dustin. Time Magazine were finally forced to narrow down the list of candidates to a fixed 100 carefully chosen personality of the last century.

Parallel to the voting for the new Seven Wonders there was a poll conducted in Spain by Telecinco to find the Seven Wonders of Spain. The last time I check the Burgos Cathedral and the Aqueduct were leading the poll with 25% votes a piece (I've since lost all interest in this sham). Incredibly the Alhambra, the magnificent palace in Granada, that was in the running for one of the new Seven Wonders in the global competition, couldn't even summon 1% of the votes in Spain.

Tags: competition