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!