Remember that Best Sports Blogs of 2010 eBook I was telling you folks about? The one with submissions from all of the BallHyped community? The one I was proud to have made the cut on? It's now been committed to print:
That’s right, a coffee table book of some of last year’s best sports blogging . . . and also, some of mine. Many thanks, again, to the BallHyped folks for compiling and editing it!
In case you were wondering what happened to this site, laying fallow and unposted-upon, and you don’t follow @lionsinwinter on Twitter where I spent all day panicking, here is your explanation: Blogger took it upon themselves to go completely offline, work late hours to ensure that it came back up, then catch a nice long victory sleep while posting and commenting was still broken for everyone living in a landlocked state, plus Michigan and Canada (I know Michigan doesn’t touch an ocean, but a landmass with 3,200 miles of beaches can’t possibly be “landlocked”).
Anyway, during this time, I couldn’t post, write drafts, comment, moderate comments, or anything to even explain what was happening. Even now, I have to use the Web editor instead of my weapons of choice, Windows Live Writer and Blogo. If I had enabled email posting pre-glitch, I could have done that, but I hadn’t, so I couldn’t. Again, my apologies. I’ve got lots of stuff planned for this week, so please keep an eye on this space—and keep a couple fingers crossed that this doesn’t happen again!
Nearly Blog of Note I've ever viewed's most recent entry has been a screencap of their browser, viewing blogsofnote.blogspot.com, with some sort of message like,
Whoa! I'm a blog of note!
Well, the time has finally come, and I would be remiss if I didn't do my duty.
WHOA! I’M A BLOG OF NOTE!
Seriously, it's a really cool honor; huge ups to Brett Wiltshire, who hooked me up. More thanks to the whole Blogger team. They were there for me when I had a lot to say, and needed a way to say it. Their free, but excellent, publishing platform has grown right with my blog, enabling me to do everything I’ve envisioned. With the Blogger platform, I’m able to focus on the writing, the art, and the look and feel—without relentlessly slaving over the nitty gritty, or paying through the nose for enterprise-class hosting.
For folks walking in the door, I invite you to check out the “About” page (courtesy of Blogger Pages!), and you’ll know exactly what I’m this blog is all about. For returning visitors, check out Blogs of Note regularly and be amazed at what people are doing out there.
Here is the 2nd-prize winning entry for the AXE Hair/TLIW Writing Contest, written by LionsFanRoc!
I won’t pretend that I’ve had to suffer more than other Lions fans, we all know what one another has been through: draft jokes about wide receivers, constant razzing from friends who are lucky enough to follow winning teams, reading moronic comments from every a$#hole with a computer, etc.
What I can tell you is that I’ve been a Lions fan as long as I can remember, living in upstate New York. When the Buffalo Bills were winning four straight AFC championships from 1990-1994, I was watching (whenever the Lions played nationally televised games) Barry Sanders, once a backup to the Bills Hall of Famer running back Thurman Thomas, try to single handedly win games for the Lions. Needless to say, despite being only 20 years old, Barry Sanders was all I’d ever had to be proud of as a Lions fan.
That is until September 27, 2009 when the Lions played the underachieving Washington Redskins.
I had waited all week for the game, wrote an article on Bleacherreport.com about what I predicted the outcome would be (a Lions win of course!), and had set up a way to watch the game streaming live with two friends of mine who were Redskins fans (both of whom are actually very attractive girls… as if I needed any more of a reason to watch!).
I walked over to their dorm 30 minutes before the game to get situated to find that my only seat would be on the floor, but I didn’t mind. It was the first time I would get to watch a game in its entirety and not on a site like justin.tv which would surely be shut down mid-game.
For an entire three hours I endured their taunts of “How can we be losing to the Lions?!”, or “God how bad are we this year?” without shoving one right back in their face. After all, they’re attractive girls and chivalry isn’t totally dead with this 20 year old. I remained polite throughout and simply decided that it was best not to test karma or get my hopes up despite being up 19-7 with only five minutes left.
Of course, my fears were confirmed with a Redskins touchdown with two and a half minutes remaining making the score 19-14. The Lions couldn’t possibly blow this game, could they?
With eight seconds left on the Lions 36 yard line the Redskins had time for one last play and I couldn’t keep my body still. The long time out right before hand sure wasn’t helping to ease the tension, I mean who knows what could happen? They could get a pass interference call in the end zone and have a play from the one yard line (something the Lions benefited from later on in 2009!).
Finally the play came. The Redskins were in trips right at the top of my screen and had another receiver at the bottom of the screen. Surely he was just a decoy; Campbell was throwing a jump ball to the right in the end zone hoping for those yellow flags.
To my surprise it was a trick play: the hook and ladder, and a poorly executed one at that. Larry Foote finally sent me into a state of jubilation I had not felt in a long time.
I proceeded to make an ass of myself, running out of the room and down the hall screaming. In my celebration I actually ran towards the wrong end of the hallway and a dead end at a locked student lounge that had been converted into a triple dorm room. It didn’t matter to me as I ran right back past the room I had exited and on to the elevator, realizing at the last second as the doors began to close that I had never thanked the girls. The exchange was awkward to say the least after my euphoric outburst, but they understood.
I received many texts, facebook posts, e-mails and even a few telephone calls of congratulations that day, but nothing was better than walking back to my own dorm room where my roommate was waiting with a handshake.
Why you ask? Because finally someone who jeered me every single week had to give my team credit… he’s a Packers fan.
One of the most difficult things about being a passionate fan of America’s most popular sport in the dawn of western society’s Information Age is . . . well, all of the information. It skews our perspective. It shrinks our worldview. It reduces everything to hyperventilated, frayed-nerve instantaneism where every single utterance of anyone in the employ of our favorite team is writ large across the glass and copper webs draped across the civilized landmasses of Earth. Every sound bite and interpretable gesture is broadcast to the masses, with thousands and thousands of ravenous fans salivating for the delivery of every bit and byte. Especially now, in the hard offseason—where nothing of significance will happen for over a fortnight—all forms of media must participate in what amounts to building construction; troweling great significance onto the most meager pebbles of news.
Unfortunately, this micro-level obsession robs us of our ability to even perceive the macro level. LaDanian Tomlinson has practically been handed the career rushing record, and it’s taken as a given that Adrian Peterson will stay healthy and productive long enough to wrest the crown from him. Larry Fitzgerald had two great playoff games this past, and analysts were saying—without sarcasm—that he had eclipsed Jerry Rice. Within minutes of the shocking news of Steve McNair’s senseless death, he was being eulogized in 140 characters or less all across the Twitterverse.
As a card-carrying member of said Twitterverse, blogosphere, forums, New Media, and what have you, I certainly am no less hungry to consume information (and have my information output be consumed) than anyone else. However, this last example--the swift, stunning death of Steve McNair—has really given me pause. Reaction, overreaction, and speculation blew all over everywhere, well in advance of any actual facts coming to light. When it comes to shocking, tragic deaths, I’d much rather find out the real story later than a dozen different wrong stories RIGHT NOW. Moreover, what does this do to the families of the victims? Outside of the very, very next of kin, I’m sure there are relatives that found out first (and probably wrong) from the Internet . . . just awful.
Seemingly millions came out of the woodwork to eulogize McNair, often based entirely on their years of having him on their fantasy team. To me, given the circumstances surrounding his death, internet denizens presuming anything about who he was off the field is laughable. For those who didn’t know him personally, all we have to go on is who we saw in uniform on Sundays: a tenacious competitor, a poised and confident leader, a quality teammate, and a consummate professional who persevered through incredible physical adversity to achieve great things in football. Please, let’s remember him for that, and spare his family any further grief.
Read more...This morning closes the deal on a decade of handwringing over the FCC's mandated national transition to digital television. After years of speculation that all but the most tech-laden homes would go dark today--prompting our government to spend over a billion dollars on converter-box vouchers--it sounds like the biggest transitional hurdle has been explaining to seniors that hooking up the new HDTV they bought to their cable or satellite service doesn't require the converter box you and I paid $40 for.
It's a part of human nature to fear change. We are creatures of habit--we love routine, we love the familiar, we cherish the nostalgic. When we see change on the horizon, we get flustered and frazzled. We blog and Tweet, we rant and rave, we chat over water coolers and dinner tables alike. We cling desperately to what has been, finding any available option to slow or stop the inevitable. We take sides--arguing over how to accept this brave new world, how to deal with the irrevocably butchered life we now must lead, how to cope with the agony and suffering sure to result from whatever's going to be different from now on.
Frequently, it ends up being no big deal.
You see, change is happening all the time. It's happening in the world around us, whether we want it or not; whether we notice it or not. Bit by bit, byte by byte, the way things "always have been" are decaying while "the way things are" are under construction.
In the sports blogging world this week, that natural evoultion manifested itself in the latest skirmish on the "MSM-Blog War" front lines. At this point the story is old news to most anyone reading this, but to recap: a blogger, Jerod Morris of Midwest Sports Fans, wrote an article exploring Raul Ibanez's curiously fast start--and what might be fueling that unusual performance. After a more widely-read blog, Hugging Harold Reynolds, linked to the story, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Gonzalez found it and absolutely savaged Morris for his "cheap shot". ESPN's Outside the Lines took the surprising step of putting Morris, Gonzalez, and FoxSports.com's senior MLB writer, Ken Rosenthal on the air for a three-way panel discussion.
What transpired on the air that day has stoked great debate. From Seattle Times columnist Geoff Baker's passionate testimony of the power of journalism--and condemnation of those who wield it irresponsibly--to Phillies blogger David S. Cohen's sober observation that Ibanez has hit for streaks like this many times before, to Deadspin's AJD's even-handed (and hilarious) assessment of all parties involved.
I'm not going to give "my take on it", since I'd be not only the last to the party, but probably the least eloquent. This battle is as old as the digital TV handwringing; quality sports blogging has been around for a long, long time, as has the established media's distrust of it. It took several years for most sportswriters to notice that their readership was going elsewhere for the non-double-sourced, non-vetted-by-the-legal-department, possibly-offensive-to-primary-sources information they craved. Grudgingly acknolwedging this market, the TV and print giants were harvesting scoops garnered by bloggers, and sending them to everyone with the credit "according to internet reports . . ." The tables continued to turn as established journalists began blogging, and were often really bad at it. From whiffing on basic Web conventions like linking to sources, to blatantly making stuff up to round out their 'rumor mill' section, many professional journalists blogged as they percieved "the bloggers" did: with a total lack of responsibility, and a total lack of professionalism. And you know what? Bloggers torched them for it.
This latest Ibanez dust-up is a tempest in a teapot. The lines between "journalist" and "blogger" and "fan with a computer" started blurring a long, long time ago. The best credentialed writers straddle all mediums with equal aplomb--knowing where and when to file raw rumor, hard news, idle thoughts, Q&A, and rampant speculation (e.g., Bill Simmons from ESPN writes both in print and online, blogs, chats, Tweets, and podcasts, all compellingly). And the rest of the lot, be they J-school laureates or bloggers in their mother's basement, will be judged not by the color of their banner, but by the character of their content. We don't need to wait for a world where bloggers can be quality reporters and analysts, and nationally syndicated columnists can personally interact with their fans on a direct and instant basis--that day is already here.
However . . . what about the readers? Sometimes I fear that those who read sports media have been conditioned to the morning paper, the beat writer and the columnist, the pure hard news and the unfettered opinion, the idea that anything they see in print is either double-checked fact or purely philosophical musing. Time and again, I see re-posting or re-Tweeting that misconstrues the original report, like a worldwide game of "Telephone". Thousand-word blog posts with stats, graphs, and analysis are shorn of their evenhandedness, boiled down to 140 characters or less, and blasted all over the Interweb in seconds. I can't tell you how many times I've seen blogs cite a local radio show or insider team source and go, "We can't believe this is true, but [source] said [story], and we just heard an independent whisper backing it up, so we're going to let you all know what we've been hearing, but please take it with a grain of salt" only to see that report touted across forums everywhere as "[Blog] reported [story] as fact, what muckrakers they are!"
New rules and new conventions about how to consume and redistribute information must, and will, pop up to prevent things like Morris' inconclusive exoneration attempt being twisted (by a "real journalist") into "HEY RAUL, SOME BLOGGER SAID YOU'RE JUICING, WHADDYA THINK?" Yes, bloggers are going to have to be more careful about the impact of their words on the ever-bigger audience they're addressing--but that audience must be more thoughtful about how they consume their information, too. The old ways of passively accepting everything they see on their doostep in the morning are dying; they must learn to parse information online with critical thought.
Too bad they don't make a digital converter box for that.
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