BallHype Blog

The results are in - check out the full report.

Tonight we launched a new service: Ballhype Bookmarks. They’re so pretty you may just want to look at them (and reload to shuffle) …

But they’ve got more going for them than just looks (see the more useful list display). Think of Bookmarks as your complete library for all sports web sites and other online resources.

For every sport, team or player, there are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of web sites that contain useful or entertaining information–and we aren’t just talking about blogs. These could be fan sites, directories, news sites, official team or player pages, forums, and so on.

As with blogs tracked by Ballhype, the owners of the site can claim their bookmark, upload an icon, and edit their information. On each sport, team or player page we’ll display a teaser of relevant bookmarks in the sidebar. Clicking the More link will take you to all bookmarks for that entity, where you can filter by site type.

We launched tonight with just under 10,000 total bookmarks. We’ll be adding many more soon, but in the meantime, if you know of a great source for sports news or entertainment that doesn’t qualify as a blog, feel free to suggest a link.

There are plenty of stereotypes of sports bloggers: guys in their underwear in a basement, in their underwear but not necessarily in a basement, guys in their pj’s in their parents’ basement, and … actually that’s about all that’s known with any certainty about bloggers. Because the medium provides a level of anonymity, it’s difficult to know much about bloggers aside from the occasional interview or blogger beauty contest.

We thought it would be interesting to learn more about who sports bloggers are as a group - why they do what they do, how long they’ve been doing it, how blogging fits into their lives, and which floor they live on.

If you’re a sports blogger, help educate the rest of the media by taking the survey. First, a few words about intent and privacy. This is not a Ballhype usage, usability, or marketing study. We promise not to use this data in any commercial way or share your answers with anyone except as follows: We will write a report publishing the data, but all multiple-choice answers will be shared only in aggregate. No one will ever know your personal information or opinions. You may request that open-ended comments be published anonymously or with attribution. And finally, we have no illusions that this will be a scientific, statistically valid study. But it will still be very cool to see the results and break new ground!

The survey will be open for responses until midnight on Saturday, July 28. We’ll publish the results the following week on Ballhype.

Sports bloggers, procrastinate for just a few more minutes and please take the survey.

UPDATE: the results are in! Read the report.