BallHype Blog

This weekend we launched a Ballhype mini-app within Facebook, the hugely popular social network that isn’t just for college kids anymore. Facebook caused quite a stir in the technology press last week with its announcement that it was opening up its platform to third-party developers. We spent about 5 seconds thinking, wow, brilliant move by Facebook and great opportunity for developers. And then immediately said to each other, OMG get to work!

So despite having guests in town and our baby’s one-year birthday party over the weekend, we managed to complete the integration with Facebook. If you’re a Facebook user who is also on Ballhype, you can install the Ballhype widget into your Facebook profile to display the stories that you’ve hyped up or submitted. This is also a good time to mention a new Ballhype feature that lets you mark which games you’ll be watching. We’ve added this to Facebook as well, so your friends will know to call and yell into the phone, Did you see that???

I could use more friends, both in real life and on Facebook. You can add me here. (Please add a note so I know you’re from Ballhype.)

But Joski has won his 4th straight Golden Picks Contest. I’m not at liberty to divulge his secret sauce (perhaps he will throw out some tips in the comments) but it’s no small feat. During the four weeks that Joski has dominated the leaderboard, 12,426 game picks have been made. Interestingly enough, the beginning of his streak was May 1st, the night of Game 5 between the Warriors and the Mavs. Joski correctly picked the Mavs.

You can’t really hate on him either, because he’s the Mother Teresa of game pickers. After taking home two Ballhype Tshirts, he’s offered up the prize to the next naked contestant in line. This week, that’s chone. So if you are wondering whether it’s worth making picks if Joski is in the running, you actually have a good shot at getting a shirt if you break the top 5. Course, I can’t guarantee his generosity (or his picks) will continue to hold. He may decide next week to keep his shirt to give his dad for Father’s Day. Not a bad idea, by the way, if you haven’t done your shopping yet.

Careful observers of our Blog Rankings at Ballhype may have noticed a mild shakeup this evening. We upgraded our methodology in a couple of ways to try to do a better job of representing current influence among sports bloggers. Before we get to those details, here’s a brief overview of how our rankings are computed:

• The rankings are driven by linking between blogs. In general, the more links a blog receives from other blogs, the higher its score.
• We also consider how many different sources are linking to a blog. 1 link each from 10 different sites is worth more than 10 links from 1 site.
• We don’t count blogrolls, and instead only consider links that appear within recent posts (more on the timing in a minute). This keeps our rankings timely, but it also means that if you’re planning a vacation, you may want to consider recruiting all-star substitutes to help keep those links flowing.

Here’s what’s new:

• The strength of the source now factors into the value of a link. In other words, a link from Deadspin is much more valuable than a link from this obsolete blog in our rankings–just like in real life. For the curious, this calculation involves iterating through the linking patterns multiple times in a technique similar to the original Google PageRank proposal–but on a much, much smaller scale.
• Improved time handling. We now consider links created in the past 90 days, but depreciate their value over time: recent links are given more value than older links. As a result of this change, the rankings are even timelier, and there won’t be as many sudden drop-offs coinciding with links expiring.

Why rank blogs at all? Something that’s true about many sports bloggers is the fact that although they’re often quite willing to help their fellow bloggers, they’re also very competitive. This provides one more way for them to keep score. It’s also a way for sports fans in general to find new blogs to read.

One last note–if you have a blog that’s several spots down from our pole position, don’t let it get you down. Blog rankings don’t affect the way that items appear on our Top Stories page, so if you have a great story, don’t be afraid to hype it up! Also, our rankings don’t incorporate strength of reader communities, comments, traffic, or even the quality of your content. There are plenty of undiscovered diamonds in the rough out there, and we’re looking forward to seeing a new batch of blogs on the leaderboard in the coming months as more new voices break through.

Someone asked us last night what the proper etiquette was for hyping up your own posts on Ballhype. He writes great stuff, but hasn’t been submitting his stories regularly to the site. As the HR department at my previous company told employees at review time, You Own Your Own Development. As in, don’t expect us to promote you without you working your tail off and telling us why we should care.

At Ballhype, we make self-promotion a lot easier with various blogger tools. We encourage you to go ahead and submit your content, keeping a couple of principles in mind:

• Submit your best stories. Stuff that you’d want to read if someone else had written it. Because let’s face it, we all have off days.
• Hype up other people’s work. Either vote for them if they’ve already been submitted, or if you’re the first to come across a great story, hype it up! Surfacing quality content for the community is what will attract new readers to the site and your own future posts. Besides, helping other bloggers out is the nice thing to do, and people notice.

Join us for the first-ever Ballhype Meetup, Bay Area Edition.

On Tuesday, June 5, we’ll be at BJ’s in San Mateo. Happy hour, Giants and A’s games, fellow sports fans, and free parking - what more could you want?

Look for us in the bar at 5:30pm - we’ll be sporting Ballhype tshirts. We’ll bring some extra shirts to give away, but you’ll have to earn them. If you think you can make it, let us know.

If you have a blog that is being tracked by Ballhype, you can now claim it. I suppose the Wagons West analogy doesn’t quite work since your blog is your own original content, whereas the pioneers were settling homesteads on Native American land, but that’s an article for a different blog, different post. You get the picture anyway, right?

Several people have already claimed their blogs. To find your blog on Ballhype, enter the name in the search box, use the Blogs rankings page, or check the team page for relevant blogs in the sidebar. Click on the Claim Blog button, then add a piece of invisible code to your site so that we can verify that you’re the rightful owner. If you have a cohort of writers, you can each claim the blog so there’s no reason to fight over who writes the most posts.

Sure, it’s nice to associate yourself with your work, but the real reason to claim your blog is to get notified when one of your posts gets submitted, commented on, or hyped up. We’ve got notification options to satisfy even the most persnickety, including instant Ballhype message or email or daily digest.

UPDATE: See Hypetiquette for tips on promoting your content on Ballhype.

Thanks to the Howie, our in-house celebrity designer and chef, you can now wear Ballhype on your (short) sleeve.

Now that the shirts are available, we’ll offer them as prizes for the weekly Golden Picks Contest, starting with whomever wins this week. Right now chimprage has a pretty comfortable lead. For everyone else, you can get your shirt the old fashioned way — a link to the Ballhype T-shirt Store is waiting patiently in the footer of the site. We don’t have an interest in the apparel business, so we’re not marking up the prices. We’d rather just go out to the park some day and see every other person wearing a Ballhype shirt. Now you know our dream.

If you do buy a shirt, snap a photo of you wearing it — preferably doing a minor feat of athleticism — and send it to us at www@ballhype.com. We’ll post them in a Ballhype Shirts in Action album. Please wear pants too, at least for the photo. For our intern’s sake.

You can now create a new type of story on Ballhype: a poll! So if you’ve been asking yourself questions like:

• Do people think the Mayweather v de la Hoya matchup was: a) the match of 21st century or b) bound to disappoint
• On Roger Clemens signing with the Yankees: a) hero and savior wrapped up in pinstripes b) way too expensive so he’d better be worth it, or c) no way that this will end well for Yankees fans
• The Warriors: a) a great team or b) the greatest team

Ok, so that last one probably isn’t a legitimate poll question. But give it a shot. As a story, people will still vote your poll up or down, so you’ll want to have an interesting question.

To kick things off, Jason and his brother gurdflavor are going to make a wager regarding the outcome of the Warriors-Jazz series. Readers get to vote on Jason’s penalty if the Warriors lose and gurdflavor’s penalty if the Jazz lose. I’ve lived with Jason before when he shaved his head… I haven’t dealt with a mohawk.

Let’s get this out of the way: YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!!! Congratulations to the Warriors and all of their fans for making history tonight!

(Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

We were planning on reserving logo-love/shout-outs for teams that win the championships in their sport, but couldn’t help ourselves. The Warriors win over the Mavericks was too exciting not to slap a little W logo up there. If anybody thinks we’re over-reacting to a first-round series victory, you don’t know how it feels after 13 years to make it this far: like a friggin’ championship! And for those fans who don’t like the Warriors, don’t get too upset (see, it’s all over the place), the logo will come down over the weekend.

And while your eyeballs are up in that general vicinity, you’ll notice that we’ve made some other changes to the header:

• a set of awesome, rock-hard tabs with relevant subnavigation - yes, Fat Phil, we experimented with a chrome finish but took it out - thanks for speaking up
• renamed the Groups link to Community - and added links to view your friends, top Ballhype contributors, and to stalk find other users
• relocated the links to the customizable Dashboard to the top of the header and your user profile sidebar

Let us know what you think of the new look or other site changes in the Ballhype Feedback and Updates Group.

It’s not quite a revolution, but in the last week 118 people have seen the writing on the wall for their teams and updated their 2007 NBA Playoffs Pick’em brackets. Among them, they’ve made a total of 399 series picks changes. A couple of observations:

• Upsets took Ballhype users by surprise. The three teams with the most new picks are the Bulls (87 more picks), Warriors (70 more picks), and the Nets (68 picks). All three of these teams have either eliminated their higher-seeded opponent or seem likely to, so predicting these teams to win, particularly 8th seeded Warriors, is no longer the wishful thinking of a die-hard fan or a purely contrarian move.
• People are pragmatists when it comes to brackets. Despite the above point, very few people are jumping on the underdog bandwagon all the way to the Finals. More than two-thirds of the changes for the Bulls, Warriors, and Nets were made to the first round series. It’s likely that more people will make changes to later series outcomes as more games are played. Then again, the potential points for correct picks will decline as more information becomes available.
• The Suns have the Warriors to thank. Well, if these bracket picks actually swayed the outcome of the playoffs, they would. The Suns are now the favorite to win on Ballhype with 137 picks. Previously, it was the Mavericks. But in the last week, the Suns have picked up 23 more picks for the Conference Finals and 17 for the Finals, gained almost entirely at the expense of the Mavs. The Mavs are still the second-favorite team to win with 111 picks, but if the Warriors do advance to the next round, my guess is that most of those picks would go to the Suns, not the Warriors.

And finally, remember that the individual game picks for the NBA playoffs games will be used in the event of a tie for the Playoffs Pick’em contest. In case you don’t think tie is possible: this week’s Golden Picks Contest was won by louismg, but Joski was only 1/10th of a point behind.