BallHype Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You may recall from our previous post on Ballhype blog rankings that our algorithms now more accurately account for influence and recency when considering a site’s incoming links. With the exception of Deadspin, pretty much every blog jostles around a few positions on a daily basis because we recalculate the blog rankings each night.

Tonight, however, two blogs exploded:

1. Ladies… moved from 22 up to 7 with their hot blogger bracket which, by the way, has me kicking myself for not making sure that the men of Ballhype were represented.

How can you resist either of these guys with their dark hair and smooth, clean-cut features?

2. TrueHoop started the morning at 37, as Henry Abbott noted, “well below Mark ‘two posts a week’ Cuban.” Ok, honestly, 37th is very respectable considering we’re tracking nearly 2000 blogs, but given his readership it is somewhat puzzling. He offered this analogy:

When TrueHoop joined ESPN, I was aware that I would lose a fair chunk of the sympathy vote… It’s like when your favorite little restaurant is on the cover of a magazine. Might be better than ever, but it isn’t your restaurant anymore, you know? It’s not the underdog.

Henry wasn’t complaining to us, but his comment did make us do a little investigation to see if there was an explanation beyond TrueHoop making the Michelin Guide. Turns out, he’s wrong about the loss of blogger love since he moved to ESPN and he’s actually ranked number 2 (it is the NBA playoffs, after all). That’s a big jump and while we’re not thrilled to report our mistake, we are glad to set the record straight. The problem was that we were not properly accounting for the unusual TrueHoop URL patterns in calculating the blog rankings. (If you look carefully, the ESPN story links are different than the home page links.) Apologies to Henry and to anyone who feels scarred by moving down one notch to make room for TrueHoop at the top.

Henry, now that you’re second, I’m sure you and your bosses will be interested in our new widget that displays your ranking on your blog. It shows your overall ranking and if you focus on a sport, it includes your rank among similarly-themed blogs. Look over at the right column to see ours in action. Nice, huh? To get your own, you need to have a claimed blog. On your blog page below your avatar, there’s a link for Ranking Widget. Click it and follow the instructions.

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t last long.

We said these rankings are dynamic, and tonight we have a different #2 blog. We received a very reasonable request to consolidate the FanHouse sports into one blog, which they are, even if the end result is something like a Devastator unleashed upon the sports blogosphere. FanHouse is now the #2 sports blog in the known universe.

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.)

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.

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.

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.