BallHype Blog

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!

Those of you who access BallHype through workFRIENDLY may not notice a difference, but we have a new look:

The makeover is courtesy of the fabulous Kelley and Linda of Pixelette Studios who also designed ShowHype. As a result, BallHype and ShowHype now look related, more like Peyton and Eli Manning instead of Kevin and Matt Dillon.

Today we launched ShowHype, a site that finds the most popular entertainment stories and videos on the web and lets users hype up the best stories, comment, or submit their own.

Sound familiar? It’s like Ballhype went to LA, got a new wardrobe and a tan, became a party circuit regular, and could tell you the latest news about any star, any time of the day. This time, we’re tracking blogs about movies, television shows, music, and celebrity gossip. We’ll soon be adding more categories like books and theater.

ShowHype’s social features are the same: you can make friends, join or create a group, and send public or private messages. One difference is that instead of schedules, scores and game picks, we have Charts. Right now you can check to see how the top movies, musical releases, and television shows are performing. We’ll be adding contests soon to test your ability to predict box office performance.

If you’re a Ballhype member, your user name and password are the same for ShowHype. Your avatar and bio have been copied over as well. The first time you check out ShowHype, you’ll need to sign in; after that, any time you sign in to either site, you’ll automatically get signed into the other.

The audience for ShowHype may be different than for Ballhype, but we hope that within each sports fan, there is a music or film or celebrity gossip-loving alter ego who will stop by at least occasionally to check on the latest news, video clip, or trailer. Some of you write regularly about culture on your sports blog, or even have an entertainment blog. If you’d like to get either tracked by ShowHype, check to see if we’ve already got it by entering the name of your blog in the search box. If not, send us a note with the URL and a brief description and we’ll add it.

We’d love to hear what you think of the new site. Join the Feedback and Updates group on ShowHype to tell us what’s on your mind and to get regular site updates.

Finally, thank you to our trusty advisors who have lent us their expertise and feedback once again, and multiple hypes for Kelley and Linda at Pixelette Studios (the geniuses behind ShowHype’s groovy design).

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.

Ballhype is now open to the public! You no longer have to be a member to view stories, but you still need to create an account to do any of the fun stuff — vote, comment, join a group, make a game pick, write or submit a story.

To all of the beta testers who provided feedback, pointed out bugs, and submitted some of the funniest sports stories I’ve ever read — thank you!! We’re intent on making Ballhype even better so keep the feedback coming.

Update: We’ve had a couple of great reviews so far on TechCrunch and louisgray.com.

Update 2: More from The Big Picture, franticindustries, and Pronet Advertising (by parislemon).

Update 3: The Ballhype Press Room has links to all of the reviews. The sports blogging community (and a few tech bloggers) really came through and supported the launch in a big way. Thank you!

Ballhype was taken down for about 30 minutes tonight while we moved the site to a new dedicated server. Those of you who have been using the site should see a small performance boost the next time you log in. The move also gives us the ability to support many more concurrent users—a capability that we hope to need for the upcoming public launch.

We actually got quite a bit of mileage out of our $15/month shared hosting plan. Here are a few quick stats on the data that was moved:

• 1434 blogs actively monitored
• 68,868 blog posts downloaded and analyzed
• 8,926 stories posted
• 8,637 players, teams, and other sports entities entered
• 1,407 game picks submitted

And, despite the preponderance of basketball bloggers participating in the beta, the most popular story on the old server was Baseball America’s Top 100 2007 Prospects. Everyone likes a list.