BallHype Blog

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.

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).

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.

Hard to believe, but NFL season is already here. It’s only pre-season, you say? Perhaps, but you can get a jump start on the regular season by filling out your picks for Ballhype’s latest contest, 17 Games.

Slightly more complicated than our Golden Picks contests (which includes both NFL and college game picks), but way simpler and less likely to result in divorce or bankruptcy than betting with a bookie, 17 Games just requires that you pick one team per week to win. You receive or lose points based on how well or poorly your team performed against the spread. Dude or dudette at the end of the regular season with the most points wins the official NFL game day ball.

What I like about 17 Games… I used to be good at math, but I now get headaches if forced to calculate odds. Nice thing here is that you don’t have to pretend to do mental math. Just look at the spread, figure out who you think has the potential to beat it, and make your pick.

We have some fun stuff planned for this contest, but I’ll let our new guest columnist have the honors in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, check out 17 Games, tell your friends, and make some picks.

The results are in - check out the full report.

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.

There are plenty of stereotypes of sports bloggers: guys in their underwear in a basement, in their underwear but not necessarily in a basement, guys in their pj’s in their parents’ basement, and … actually that’s about all that’s known with any certainty about bloggers. Because the medium provides a level of anonymity, it’s difficult to know much about bloggers aside from the occasional interview or blogger beauty contest.

We thought it would be interesting to learn more about who sports bloggers are as a group - why they do what they do, how long they’ve been doing it, how blogging fits into their lives, and which floor they live on.

If you’re a sports blogger, help educate the rest of the media by taking the survey. First, a few words about intent and privacy. This is not a Ballhype usage, usability, or marketing study. We promise not to use this data in any commercial way or share your answers with anyone except as follows: We will write a report publishing the data, but all multiple-choice answers will be shared only in aggregate. No one will ever know your personal information or opinions. You may request that open-ended comments be published anonymously or with attribution. And finally, we have no illusions that this will be a scientific, statistically valid study. But it will still be very cool to see the results and break new ground!

The survey will be open for responses until midnight on Saturday, July 28. We’ll publish the results the following week on Ballhype.

Sports bloggers, procrastinate for just a few more minutes and please take the survey.

UPDATE: the results are in! Read the report.

But if you put it on top of a pretty vase and turned the lights down low, the new NBA ball kind of looks like the championship trophy that was just won by the Spurs tonight. And with the end of the Finals series that swept the Cavs but few others off their feet, we are nevertheless happy to announce the winner of Ballhype’s 2007 NBA Playoffs Pick’em Contest is chicocat21. The prize if you recall, is the official ball of the NBA that was unveiled with some fanfare and met with great resistance.

chicocat21 beat out 553 other Ballhype members to win the contest. Mr. or Ms. chicocat21, congratulations! You changed your bracket only once, to switch the Eastern Conference winners from the Cavs to the Pistons (your first instinct on this one was right, not that it mattered), and you picked the entire Western Conference correctly from the get-go. We’re impressed, and hope you come back to give some of the regulars in the weekly game picks a run for their t-shirt.

On Monday night, Joski got his fifth consecutive Golden Picks Award. We remarked on his achievement back when he won the fourth, so we won’t do too much whoopin’ it up today. (And yes, I realize this should have been written earlier in the week but … well, I didn’t get it done.)

However, we do have from the master himself, a deceptively simple strategy for winning:

1) teams are rarely more than 3-2 underdogs

2) all things being equal, the home team will tend to win

Why would Joski share his ancient wisdom with the rest of us? He is sick of wearing Ballhype tshirts every day. And he acknowledged that “it’ll make it a lot more challenging (and fun) for everyone if there aren’t big gaps in the odds which folks can exploit.” Note that this week he’s only in eighth place on the leaderboard, so make of that what you will.

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.