BallHype Blog

We have a new contest up over at ShowHype for the Academy Awards. See how many of the major categories you can pick correctly. If you watch the broadcast, it’ll make the 4 hours feel more like 2, and if you don’t, you may be all the more delightfully surprised the following morning to find out you’ve won.

The rules are essentially the same as the Pop Quizzes. Correct picks count more if they are upsets (e.g., Michael Clayton for Best Picture); for more, read an example of the scoring methodology.

The lucky winner will receive a $100 gift certificate to Fandango. (Puppets not included.) To motivate you all to get your significant other, coworkers, and in-laws to play, we’ll also give a $50 Fandango gift certificate to the administrator of the ShowHype Group with the most Oscar-picking participants.

Not included in this contest are the technical Oscars. I was too bored even reading the list of categories. Also omitted, although not due to lack of interest: an Oscar night drinking game.

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.

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).