BallHype Blog

Basketball fans, welcome to the most anticipated postseason in years. Despite the absence of last year’s Cinderella team, the 2008 NBA playoffs figure to be a shootout, especially in the Western Conference, where nearly every team has a realistic shot at the Finals. With such a wide open race, we’re excited to re-launch our 2008 NBA Playoffs Pick’em Bracket!

You make the picks, you set the odds. Just before tipoff of Game 1, the odds will be frozen based on the number of people entering the contest and the picks they’ve made. At the end we’ll tally up the points and award the winner an iPod touch. For the uninitiated, it’s like an iPhone but without the phone. What’s left you ask? Movies, music, photos, and WiFi internet for email, maps, and more.

Two quick reminders before you go stampeding for your brackets… First, you can run this contest with your friends by creating a BallHype Group. Just select this as one of the games you want us to track in your group’s settings. Second, in the event of a tie, the winner will be the person with the higher NBA playoffs game picks score – so don’t forget to make your weekly game picks.

Fill out your 2008 NBA Playoffs Bracket.

It’s been one year since we launched BallHype! Quite a year for sports and sports blogging, and we’re happy to have been a part of the action. We recognize that without the support of loyal users, bloggers and non-bloggers alike, BallHype (and now ShowHype) would be a much less interesting place to visit. So a big thank you to everyone who visits and contributes to the sites!

And now, cue the theme music for a walk down memory lane… Since we’re computer geeks, we’ll throw in a few 1’s and 0’s.

April 2007 - BallHype launched our public beta on baseball’s opening day, after two months of closed beta testing with a couple hundred users.

May - The first high-volume story to grace BallHype was the video of Baron Davis dunking on Andre Kirilenko, which later won the Posterization of the Year award.

June - Blog claiming begins to take hold, with 180 claimed blogs by the end of the month. Today half of the tracked BallHype blogs have been claimed by their owners.

July - kcudah posted his 1,000th story to BallHype. He’s now at 4249 stories, and our next top contributor, ric-s, has posted 3020. We’re hugely grateful to them and to all of the other fans who scour the internet to share breaking news and entertaining videos.

August - Our mission is to make it easy for users to get to the best sports (and entertainment) content on the web. In August, we marked the 1,000,000th click from BallHype to another sports web site.

September - 100,000th story posted to BallHype. We allow users to share articles or videos, but we also create stories automatically when our tracked blogs link to videos or stories.

October - ShowHype, our foray into the world of entertainment, launched. The top story of the day was an in-depth profile of David Simon. One of the best things about ShowHype has been the ability to track all things The Wire for the past 6 months, although Comcast On Demand (grrr) made avoiding spoilers tricky.

November - 10,000th video posted. And BallHype’s beta period officially ended with a new site design that generated a bit of … ahem… discussion.

December - 1,000,000th blog post analyzed. Today we track more than 2200 sports blogs and 1300 entertainment blogs. I am now in danger of spending way too much time reading online instead of working… Wait, that is my job–nice!

January – Big news months for both sites. In sports, you had the Santana trade, the NFL playoffs, the Jazz having a bit o’ fun, and Chris Berman outtakes. In entertainment, you had breakdowns by Britney and Amy, Heath Ledger’s tragic death, and celebrity baby crazes.

February - 1,000,000th page published between BallHype and ShowHype; we upgrade to better, faster, more expensive servers.

March – 3 million page views across both sites. And what better way to end the year than with Bush’s warm reception at the Nationals’ season opener.

Thanks again to everyone who supported us this year by getting the word out, visiting the sites, and sending us feedback. We love hearing from you so keep telling us what we’re doing right and how we can improve.

Here’s to the Terrible Two’s!

Sometimes a photo communicates what words cannot. Without photographic evidence, we might still be debating whether a galloping horse is ever airborne or, worse, unaware of MJ’s ability to multi-task.

Regular users know that we’ve been displaying automated story thumbnails for some time, but tonight we launched story photo upload to BallHype and ShowHype. You can upload a photo to a story that you submit or write, tag it, and the photo will appear both on the story page and in the tagged entity’s thumbnail album. The photos in the album link back to the original source, so it’s another way for sports or entertainment fans to discover new content. By mousing over the thumbnails in Lindsay Lohan’s album, for example, you get a nice roundup of the latest stories.

How it works:

When writing an original story, you can upload up to 5 images by clicking the Preview button after each upload. The first uploaded photo will serve as the thumbnail image for a story. You can then move the image around using the editing tool. If you submit a link to a published story, you may upload one photo, which will appear after the description.

After uploading, you can edit which story tags apply to the photo. Later, you can flag photos as misclassified or inappropriate from story pages or from photo albums.

BallHype’s weekly Golden Picks Contest has a new sponsor: WhatIfSports.com. Each week, the person with the best game picks score will receive a $15 gift certificate good for one free season of sports simulation games on WhatIfSports.com.

By the way, if you are a Yankees fan and have spent many a drunken night convincing anyone who would listen that the 1927 Yankees were better than the 2007 Red Sox, you would be right (according to their SimMatchup tool, which is free and not part of the prize but pretty cool nonetheless).

So grease the mouse wheel and make your game picks. Best to get in shape now for March Madness, which will be soon upon us (recruit your office pool early and watch for the bracket contest on BallHype).

We have a new contest up over at ShowHype for the Academy Awards. See how many of the major categories you can pick correctly. If you watch the broadcast, it’ll make the 4 hours feel more like 2, and if you don’t, you may be all the more delightfully surprised the following morning to find out you’ve won.

The rules are essentially the same as the Pop Quizzes. Correct picks count more if they are upsets (e.g., Michael Clayton for Best Picture); for more, read an example of the scoring methodology.

The lucky winner will receive a $100 gift certificate to Fandango. (Puppets not included.) To motivate you all to get your significant other, coworkers, and in-laws to play, we’ll also give a $50 Fandango gift certificate to the administrator of the ShowHype Group with the most Oscar-picking participants.

Not included in this contest are the technical Oscars. I was too bored even reading the list of categories. Also omitted, although not due to lack of interest: an Oscar night drinking game.

If you’ve been wondering when we were going to get off our bums and put out a ShowHype contest, you have your answer. Tonight we launched Pop Quiz, which asks such weighty questions as “Will National Treasure: Book of Secrets outperform the original National Treasure weekend gross of $35M?”

As with Game Picks, the odds are set by the contest participants. If one person predicts P.S. I Love You to open big this weekend and everyone else goes with the crowd and votes Sweeney Todd or National Treasure, the Hilary Swank fan is in for a big payday if Johnny and Nic don’t deliver.

A couple of differences between ShowHype’s Pop Quiz and BallHype’s Game Picks…

1. Unlike sports, we don’t have regularly scheduled contests between teams in entertainment (Walk Hard vs. Sweeney Todd aside). So we’ll identify interesting match-ups ourselves on at least a weekly basis. Some of them will be straightforward box office rankings, but we’ll also quiz you on things like the next person to get voted off Survivor or which Kardashian daughter will be the first to marry then divorce Joe Francis.

2. Not all questions are worth the same number of points. There’s a Pop Quiz Factor at the end of each question, which will serve as the multiplier when we calculate the score. (Details on scoring in the FAQ.) This gives us the artistic freedom to assign bonus points to a particular question or amp up the wattage on an awards show ballot.

Those of you who access BallHype through workFRIENDLY may not notice a difference, but we have a new look:

The makeover is courtesy of the fabulous Kelley and Linda of Pixelette Studios who also designed ShowHype. As a result, BallHype and ShowHype now look related, more like Peyton and Eli Manning instead of Kevin and Matt Dillon.

We’ve added a new category to Ballhype: Combat Sports, which includes boxing and mixed martial arts. Jason has added a couple dozen combat sports blogs but if you know of other good ones that we’re missing, let us know.

For the 3 people who might wonder why a site named Ballhype covers the UFC, I would say that the cojones required for facing off against Chuck Liddell more than qualifies.

Today we launched ShowHype, a site that finds the most popular entertainment stories and videos on the web and lets users hype up the best stories, comment, or submit their own.

Sound familiar? It’s like Ballhype went to LA, got a new wardrobe and a tan, became a party circuit regular, and could tell you the latest news about any star, any time of the day. This time, we’re tracking blogs about movies, television shows, music, and celebrity gossip. We’ll soon be adding more categories like books and theater.

ShowHype’s social features are the same: you can make friends, join or create a group, and send public or private messages. One difference is that instead of schedules, scores and game picks, we have Charts. Right now you can check to see how the top movies, musical releases, and television shows are performing. We’ll be adding contests soon to test your ability to predict box office performance.

If you’re a Ballhype member, your user name and password are the same for ShowHype. Your avatar and bio have been copied over as well. The first time you check out ShowHype, you’ll need to sign in; after that, any time you sign in to either site, you’ll automatically get signed into the other.

The audience for ShowHype may be different than for Ballhype, but we hope that within each sports fan, there is a music or film or celebrity gossip-loving alter ego who will stop by at least occasionally to check on the latest news, video clip, or trailer. Some of you write regularly about culture on your sports blog, or even have an entertainment blog. If you’d like to get either tracked by ShowHype, check to see if we’ve already got it by entering the name of your blog in the search box. If not, send us a note with the URL and a brief description and we’ll add it.

We’d love to hear what you think of the new site. Join the Feedback and Updates group on ShowHype to tell us what’s on your mind and to get regular site updates.

Finally, thank you to our trusty advisors who have lent us their expertise and feedback once again, and multiple hypes for Kelley and Linda at Pixelette Studios (the geniuses behind ShowHype’s groovy design).

What were the biggest stories in sports? Prior to April 2007, you could only guess. If only there were a way to travel back in time… [cue harp music and rippled visual effects]

In the NFL on January 22, 2007, … Michael Vick’s magic water bottle airport adventure! In the NBA, Pau Gasol, the Nike Air Force ad, and a Sonics story were the most linked stories.

That’s right, we’ve unleashed the Ballhype internets searcher thingy to go back in time and look at every article written and linked to by the blogs we track. As of now, all of 2007 is archived. There’s an Archive link in the More box in the right hand column on every sports home page and every entity page. In a related development, you can also now enter words or phrases into the search box and retrieve a list of current and archived stories.

We’ll be adding more history as soon as I can get more Red Bull to keep Jason going.