Trails of troubles,
Roads of battles,
Paths of victory,
I shall walk.
- PATHS OF VICTORY

The votes have been tallied, checked and verified by our independent auditors. With over 250 tweets to the #cmshaiku hashtag and 114 votes in the Grand Winner category, it’s been more popular than expected. Time to announce the #cmshaiku 2010 winnners. The worthy Grand Winner from Cheryl McKinnon (who knows a thing or two about legacy vendors and legal):

Legacy vendors
want to play haiku too but
poems stuck in legal

I’ve always suspected that Peter Monks is actually a Bot written in Erlang, but he proved me wrong. He’s actually a BotNet with a powerful Poetry Plugin. Sadly, his Distributed Denial of Justice attack meant that poor Kathy Brown’s masterpiece was pushed into third. Philippe came a close fourth, although yours truly thinks his was probably the most inspired entry.

Cheryl (Self Promotion) and Peter’s (Random) legions of voters meant they also won their categories. Embarassingly I won the Product category by a country mile. Laurence Hart won the General section, and Paul Carvill won the Despair section. I fear I did Philippe (@proops) a disservice by including both his genius open source haiku and my fork in the same category, thus splitting the vote.

So, I owe Cheryl, Peter, Kathy, Laurence and Paul beers. You’ll receive your prizes next time we happen to be in a bar together. All liability for events occuring after drinking said beer falls squarely on the drinker. Kathy can tell you what happened last time I bought her a beer …

If you need a bit more poetry in your life, you can follow all the entrants using this Twitter list.  Also, a special shout to Tim Walters for laughing in the face of the Forrester personal brand building embargo.

Lastly, make sure you get your copy of the book from our friends at Gilbane Outsell.

And please, I beg, tweet /  haiku should inspiration / find you! For the book.

Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don’t win the race,
It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.
- I AND I

It’s the biggest competition to hit the web in a long time – The 2010 CMS Haiku Beer Contest. We created the fourth worst poetry in history, caused the CEO of Sun to resign, and inspired a prize for the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. If I have forgotten you, please leave your entry in the comments. You can still make the book.

But enough of that, it’s time to pick the winners. Due to the overwhelming response, I’ve divided the best into six categories of five. Please vote in each category. Voting closes on Feb 10. I’m buying beers for all the winners.

There were many other fine entries. Sadly, a few good ones didn’t meet the strict traditional 5/7/5 syllable rule. We decided that an @ or a # could count as a syllable, but didn’t have to.

Happy voting, and watch this space for the winners.