BallHype Blog

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.

Ballhype is now picking up thumbnail images from stories we track. With no scientific evidence to back me up, it appears that users are more likely to hype up a story with a photo than those without. Even drawings work to attract attention. Yesterday while we were still working out some of the kinks of image capture, I read the Manny Ramirez story from The New Yorker. I noticed that we were missing the graphic, so I added it to the post and within a couple of hours it shot up to the top story on Ballhype. It’s further down the page now, displaced by the Warriors-Mavs recap and NBA Hair Watch.

Also over the weekend, we added autos, tennis, and golf. If you notice we’re missing some great sites in these categories, please send us the links so we can add them to the list.

While waiting for the Warriors to end their 12-year playoff drought (Dallas, we’re coming for you!!!) we created a new game to play on Ballhype: The 2007 NBA Playoffs Pick’em.

Think NCAA bracket meets Ballhype Game Picks. You fill out a bracket like an NCAA tournament, except that you get to update your picks after the games begin, and the points you earn are based on how many other people participate and how they’re picking. Of course, as you change your picks to follow the wisdom of the crowd, you may lose potential points. But if you have the courage to stick with an underdog that ends up pulling through for you, you’ll score big.

Sound fun? Wait, there’s more! We’re offering a prize to the user with the highest score at the end of the Finals. One smart, lucky person will get the new official game ball of the NBA! Players love it and we know you will too, so get truckin’ over to the contest page, read the little primer on scoring, and fill out your bracket.

You can make the Playoffs Pick’em Contest even more exciting (but not addictive - Ballhype does not condone gambling) by competing against your friends and family. Create a Ballhype Group, get your buddies, co-workers and favorite in-laws to create an account, and you’ll be able to track your scores and rankings within your Group.

If you’ve been making game picks on Ballhype the past few days, you may have noticed that we started tracking results on a weekly basis. And the first winner of the Ballhype Golden Picks Award: louismg! For his reward, louismg receives a featured spot on the Ballhype home page and on the Games page. His avatar will also sport a nice glowing halo all week.

The top users in each sports category will be featured on the NBA, MLB, and NHL Games pages this week. Those winners are: NBA - Dex, MLB - louismg, and NHL - kcudah. Congratulations to all of the winners!

Wondering how you ranked? Check out the Golden Picks Contest Leaderboard. (Note that Jason’s score for NBA picks is not counted since he’s a Ballhype employee.)

If you’re an active user, you may have already received a message in your email or Ballhype Inbox telling you that someone commented on your post or that sadly, your game picks ranking just went down by -3. We now have notifications capability for a number of different events: when someone comments on one of your stories, when you receive a Ballhype private message, when someone leaves a sticky note, when someone else comments on a story that you commented on, and how your game picks made out.

To avoid clogging your email (although if you use Yahoo, who cares!!), we’re providing multiple options for each type of event, including no notification at all. I won’t go into it all here; check out the options and change the default settings by clicking the Notification Preferences link next to your avatar in your profile sidebar box.

We made two updates to the site last night for your viewing pleasure: 1) we posted the first Ballhype Demo, and 2) added support for embedded YouTube and Google Video.

The demo was made with Camtasia which I have to say is a huge upgrade from what I was previously using. I’ve wanted to get a demo posted for a couple of weeks now, but with all of the changes we’ve been implementing on the site (user profile sidebar, locale filter, sport navigation in the header, to name a few), I kept putting it off. Even last night I ended up splicing extra clips in because the demo was getting outdated even as I was working on it. No time for a code freeze around here.

As soon as Jason deployed the YouTube video support, they removed the SNL Peyton Manning clip from YouTube, so the first usage of this feature kind of bit the dust. But already today there are several more on the site.

As a couple of you have brilliantly suggested, we’ve launched Groups on Ballhype. Users can create groups and invite friends or other users on Ballhype that have shared interests, for example everyone who has picked the Boston Celtics as a favorite team. Groups can be designated public or private or in-between.

As the number of users on Ballhype grows, Groups is one way to keep it fun and personal, like joining a fraternity at a Big Ten school. You’ll be able to watch what other members of your group are hyping and submitting, compete over rankings on game picks, get together for beer, or whatever. (We don’t supply the beer.)