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It’s That Time of Year Again

Local people will hate me for writing this, and most non-locals won’t get why it’s a big deal.

It is really sad funny, but I didn’t know that football season started today until about 30 minutes before the UT game. This is what is considered the real football season around here by the way, not the NFL. I’m risking my status as a Knoxville resident by admitting that I wasn’t really aware and don’t care that much about UT football.

Now for the fun part. The start of football season means that it’s time to start listening to sports talk radio again. See, I’m not really a football fan, but I’m a huge “Members of the Knoxville Chapter of Mensa talking about football on the radio” fan. It’s hard to believe the entertainment they provide is actually free.

I just checked the scores and saw that the Vols lost, so it should be good this week of radio. The chicken littles will be out en masse, not realizing that win or lose, they still have to go to work on Monday. I’ve never understood how people can get so emotionally invested in something over which they have no control. Maybe that’s it? The fact that they don’t have control is what makes them freak out over it? Dunno.

Anyway, here’s a quick stab in the dark of some things we may here this week:
“Phil Fulmer should be fired”
“I don’t understand why they ran _____ on that 2nd and 4 during the 3rd quarter”
“How many games does Phil have to win this year to keep his job?”
“Let’s just hope Cal wins out.”
“If Fulmer gets fired or resigns, who should we go after as a coach?”
“I just want to say GO VOLS! I’ll hang up and listen to your comments.”
“If the NFL comes after Phil, what are the chances of him leaving?”

See a common theme here? Tennessee fans do love them a good coach firing!!!

***UPDATE***
As sure as the sun rises. The first comment on the article in the KNS I linked to:
“it just goes to show that we pay top dollar to overrated coaches (phill fulmer mostly)”

I love this time of year! It’s better than Christmas and Arbor Day combined!!!

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He Plays, err, Blogs the Right Way

All the recent talk locally about proper link attribution prompted me to finish a post I started a while back about blogging and baseball. “Everything I need to know about blogging I learned from watching baseball”? Eh, don’t really like that title too much. Plus it sounds like link bait, and I’d never do that. 😉

But I do like the notion of “playing the game the right way”. To me, that’s just about the highest honor you can give a baseball player. In a lot of ways, the same things relate to blogging:

Persistence pays off–show up every day

Cal RipkenIf you go by the numbers, Cal Ripken Jr may not look like a Hall of Famer. His batting average isn’t spectacular(.276), he didn’t hit an incredible amount of home runs (431) given the number of games he played (3001). Ripken instead sealed his legacy by being a great shortstop and showing up to play every day for a very long time (2131 consecutive games). Some days it was miserably cold, and he played. Some days it was miserably hot, and he played. Some days he was injured, and he played. A lot of days he was just plain old, and he played. While Cal’s numbers may not be all that impressive, the fact that he was so reliable is.

Be consistent and reliable for your readers. Show up every day (or week, or whatever your posting frequency is), and bring the best game you’ve got. You may only be able to outsmart, outwrite, and out search engine optimize half of the bloggers out there. The other half you will have to outwork!

Try to be the best at what you do, and the rest will take care of itself

The Wizard of OzzieFor position players, Hall of Fame credentials are usually decided by offensive numbers. Ozzie Smith is a rare exception. Why? Because his defense (13 Gold Gloves) was exceptional. With his unreal abilities at the shortstop position, there’s no telling how many runs Ozzie was able to save for his team on defense. The fact that he wasn’t always an exceptional producer on offense is overshadowed by the fact that he is the all time best on defense.

Very few bloggers are good at all aspects of the game. Concentrate on what you do best. If you are a great writer, write. If you are a great layout designer, design. If you are a great programmer, program. If you are even average at your deficiencies you can be successful. If you are excellent at your strengths, you’ll have no problem finding experts in other fields who recognize your greatness and want to be associated with you.

Cheating may get you there, but there’s a price to pay in the long run

Bonds CheaterHe-who’s-name-will-not-be-mentioned-here hit an awful lot of home runs. Very few people I know think his record is legitimate. Even fewer think very highly of him as a person. He’s basically ruined his own legacy by cheating to create it.

Don’t cheat. Learn the ropes. Hell, even learn a few tricks. But don’t cheat. Any short term gains you get won’t be worth the price you’ll have to pay in the long run. As a blogger, you need to be trusted, even if “trusted” means that people know for certain they will find nothing at your blog but a hilarious curse word laced story. Don’t spam for links. Don’t promise something that you can’t deliver. And by all means don’t steal content.

When it’s not working out, you have options

Rick AnkielI can’t tell Rick Ankiel’s story better than John Hutcheson. Short story–Rick Ankiel was a big league pitcher. He lost his stuff. He tried to get it back. He failed. Repeatedly. He went back to the minors and learned to play the outfield. He returned to the big leagues in 2007 as a Cardinals outfielder.

When something isn’t working out for you as a blogger, don’t be afraid to try something new. You’ll have to work at it, and you’ll have to learn something new. But since when are those bad things? And you’ll still be in the game.

By the way, Ankiel hit a three run homer in his first game as an outfielder.

When the someone comes after you, be ready!

In 1980, Dave Winfield charged the mound on Nolan Ryan and gave him a beat down. No one tested Ryan’s skills at the sweet science again until 1993. There was no reason to–the guy throws 100 mph. If he wanted to hurt you, you’d already be hurt. But in Nolan Ryan’s final season, he hit Robin Ventura in the arm, and Ventura came after him. This time, Ryan was ready, and the insuing butt-kicking Ventura received let everyone know that Nolan Ryan is not a guy you want to mess with.

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If you establish any kind of success as a blogger, someone is bound to come after you. While you can’t get them in a headlock and pummel them six times until Pudge Rodriguez comes out to rescue them, if you pay for hosting for you own domain, you need to make sure that your site is secure and your data is backed up from day one. Also, monitor your incoming links to make sure they are on the up and up. Don’t let someone else make you look spammy.

By the way, Ventura was ejected and Nolan Ryan completed the game without giving up another hit.

Conditions will change, and fame can come from anywhere

In 1922, the St. Louis Cardinals traded Cliff Heathcote to the Chicago Cubs in between games of a double header with the Cubs! If not for this fact, who would ever remember Heathcote?

Things change very quickly online. Who knew anything about social networking three years ago and the way it would change things? If you’ve produced quality content before the change, the same content will be just as valuable after the change. Keep doing what you do and continue to learn about how that fits in with the current environment. You’ll be surprised to find that some of what you consider to be your most unremarkable stuff is what people end up knowing you for.

By the way, Heathcote went 2-4 in the second game.

Last but not least…

Give credit to your teammates

In post game interviews with pitchers who have just thrown a perfect games or no-hitters, they generally thank two people–“God and my teammates”. This isn’t just lip service. These guys know they would not have been able to reach this achievement without a lot of support from other people (and elsewhere). The best even call out their teammates by name. Even that guy-who’s-name-I-won’t-type was big enough to thank the teammates he’d had throughout the years, and this was the closest he’s come to speaking to some of them.

Make sure you site your resources. Most of the time they will be people just like you scraping to get their blog seen and read. Know that you can help them most by giving them relevant anchor text in the link.

Can you tell I am was a Cardinals fan?

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Now we are getting serious

From the Assoicated Press (Mark Stevenson)

Dean’s path takes it directly through the Cantarell oil field, Mexico’s most productive. The entire field’s operations were shut down just ahead of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

At $75 a barrel (that’s a hair low), that is $202million dollars a day. Just think of the tax money the gov’ment is losing in taxes. You would think they would do something about these storms with this much money on the line. Obviously Georgina Hernandez agrees with me.

“If only the government would lend us a hand,” said Georgina Hernandez, 59, whose three children all lost their homes in the town of Los Limones.

Do you think she sees any of that $202million a day?

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Why Can’t a Guy Like This Run For Public Office?

George Will’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post is about MLB umpire Bruce Froemming. There are several good stories told in this short column, but this one is my favorite:

A story for Froemming: Rogers Hornsby, who averaged.400 over five years, was facing a rookie pitcher who threw three pitches that he thought were strikes but that the umpire called balls. The rookie shouted a complaint to the umpire, who replied: “Young man, when you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know.”

Baseball is a lot different than most other sports in that there isn’t really any subjectivity to the rules. Sure, umpires have to make judgements, but the rules are clearly defined. You never hear commentators say, “wow, they’re calling it really tight tonight” the way they do in football or basketball.

Then there is this:

Consider Sept. 2, 1972, when Froemming was behind the plate and the Cubs’ Milt Pappas was one strike from doing what only 15 pitchers have done — pitch a perfect game, 27 up, 27 down. With two outs in the ninth, Pappas got an 0-2 count on the 27th batter. Froemming called the next three pitches balls. An agitated Pappas started walking toward Froemming, who said to the Cubs’ catcher: “Tell him if he gets here, just keep walking” — to the showers.

Pappas’s next pitch was low and outside. Although he did get his no-hitter, the greater glory — a perfect game — was lost. Another kind of glory — the integrity of rules — was achieved.

This couldn’t happen (and rightly so) in football or basketball where officials are very hesitant to call things like pass interference or ticky-tack fouls in the closing seconds of a game. I think this is due to the nature of the sports. Baseball has a finite numer of situations and possible actions. It lends itself to a strict enforcement of the rules that other team sports usually aren’t afforded.

When I read articles like this, I’m reminded of how much I love(d) baseball–the sport, not MLB. It’s such a simple, complicated, and smart game.

It’s really sad that it has been pretty much ruined in the US.

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PacMan Jones is a Wrassler!

The Tennessean dropped that bomb today.

I hate to say it, but this worries me. Professional wrestlers have a hard enough time staying out of trouble and living clean lives without throwing in bad seeds like PacMan Jones.

Why stop there? If TNA is going to stoop this low they might as well send Barry Bonds down to ringside to be his manager carrying a Louisville Slugger. They’ve lost all legitimacy.

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Ten Reasons to Ditch MySpace and Start YourSpace

1. ARE YOU SMART AND/OR INTERESTING?

If you are smart and/or interesting, you can easily create your own site. On your own website the possibilities are endless. You can blog all you want, add huge galleries of photos and videos, private message boards for you and your friends to contribute, etc. People who want to visit your MySpace account (and actually care about what is there), will come to your private site as well.

If you are smart, you don’t even have to be interesting to start your own site. I have lots of friends who fall into this category, and proudly count myself among them. Even if we’re not that interesting to most people, at least we’re interesting to each other. The last thing I want to do is advertise what a boring dolt I am to a bunch of “cool people” (like those on MySpace)

If you are interesting, you don’t have to be smart. Use your charisma to get one of your smart friends to help you out.

2. PROXY SERVER WASTELAND

Your personal time at home is too valuable to waste browsing around MySpace. If you can’t do it on someone else’s time, don’t bother. Unless you are living in 2006, MySpace is probably already blocked by the proxy server where you work. If not, you may want to consider looking for a job…the guys in your IT department aren’t well managed, and the whole place is going to hell in a hand-basket sooner or later.

Of course I’m joking. You should work while you’re at work, and work on your own stuff while you’re at home. I was just kidding (but not really).

You will more than likely be able to access your own site from work. This will allow you to continually keep up with what your friends are saying about you, what photos of you have been posted, and what other people are saying about your content. Sounds like MySpace, right?

One other plus is that you can set up your own webmail account on your site that probably will not be blocked by your proxy at work. Even if your company blocks most webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc) they’ll not be on the lookout for your site.

3. HOW BIG WAS YOUR LAST CHECK FROM MYSPACE?

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you are smart and interesting, but just not famous (yet)–you have no book to pimp, no movie coming out next month, no album you recorded in your basement, and no calendar that features you in provocative poses with arctic animals. What exactly are YOU getting in return for providing MySpace (News Corp.) with all of this content about someone as original and cool as you?

If you notice, MySpace has ads all over “your” page, but they aren’t leaving messages asking where they can send your share of the revenues, right?

Set up your own site, throw a couple of AdSense ads up there and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you will get exactly what you’ve been getting from MySpace, maybe even 2 or 3 times as much. 😛

Best case, you’ll write a few interesting things that get picked up on bigger sites, and tons of traffic flow your way.

MySpace, along with other sites that are nothing but user-provided content, makes millions of dollars a year off of what YOU write and post! Don’t give it away for free! Keep it for yourself.

4. MY SO-CALLED FRIENDS

I’m willing to concede the fact that every now and then you will find someone, or they will find you, on MySpace that you’ve lost contact with over the years. But those years are probably before 1995 or so. At this point, do you really care? I mean REALLY care? Sure, it’s nice to catch up, but you aren’t friends anymore, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to look you up on MySpace to find you.

Your real friends are the ones that send you a message when their email address or phone number changes so that you don’t lose touch. You may not talk to them on a daily basis, but you feel it’s worthwhile to maintain a point of contact with one another. You don’t need MySpace to keep track of your friends.

Your real friends will be delighted to visit your site.

5. SPAM

MySpace is mostly spam. I’m not talking about the “buy viagra” or “xanax at wholesale prices” spam. I’m talking about the people and bands you’ve never heard of and have no interest in knowing asking you to be their friend all of the time. The biggest clue that you are being spammed is to check out their MySpace page. They will have at least 3,000 “friends” along with a page full of witty comments from their friends like “thanks for the add!” or “what up baby girl?”

Invariably, each of the ass-clowns who left a comment on their site have a thousand or so friends themselves. It’s like there’s some sort of contest to see who can get the most links from desperate people they don’t even know.

Put up your own site, and you won’t have to deal with this–at least not at the same level. Yeah, you’ll get some spam on your blog if you have comments enabled. Just make sure comments have to be approved before they are posted and you are safe.

Again, if you are even a little interesting and have a squirrel’s brain, it’s time to leave the world of “thanks for the add” and put up some real content. Even if you like the stupid side of MySpace, make it your own.

6. JANET JACKSON SAID IT BEST–CONTROL

If you have your own site, YOU control who gets on, what content is displayed, who gets a link, what kind of ads to run. Although there are plenty of people who will have a hard time navigating anything that isn’t exactly where they think it should be, you’ll have complete creative and editorial control on your site with layout as well.

7. STALKERS

Quite frankly, I’m tired of all the chicks using MySpace as a launchpad in their quest to meet me. I’m taken, and I like it that way. So give it a rest.

If you’re like me (and I’m sure you are), build your own private haven from these psychotic impudent strumpets.

8. A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW

Let’s face it. MySpace just isn’t cool anymore. Ever notice when you log on you can always see links to the “cool new people”? I hate to be mean, but if someone is just now getting a MySpace account, they may be new, they may be smart, and they may be interesting. But they definitely aren’t cool.

In fact, most MySpace accounts created any time in the last year or so were created by people who are not cool. since more accounts are added every day (about 230,000 according to Wikipedia), MySpace is becoming less and less cool by the minute.

Based on Wikipedia’s numbers, in the last year alone, 83,000,000 accounts have been added. I don’t know about you, but my tipping point for cool in a group is about 66.67%. If 1/3 of the people in a group aren’t cool, the group isn’t cool.

Start your own site, and only let cool people–at least let people you think are cool–hang around.

9. PUNK ASS KIDS

The older I get, the less tolerant I am of all these punk ass kids. In reality, it isn’t so much that I’m less tolerant as much as it is that I’m jealous that I can’t be a punk ass kid too.

Whether it’s annoyance or envy, I don’t want to be around them unless I’m making them run at rugby practice. I don’t want to be their friend. And I especially don’t want them finding out about how cool Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare are. Everyone knows that once a punk ass kid thinks something is cool it is only a matter of time before it sucks.

If you are like me, this is a great reason to start your own site. You can talk about boring things that already suck like reading books, politics, or earning a living and building wealth. These topics are sure to scare off the punk ass kids. They’ll never come close to finding you if you’re on your own.

10. TRADE-IN VALUE

It never fails…as soon as something great come out, something greater comes out a little bit later. As they say at my place of employment, “take good and make it better.” As our ADD lifestyle in this country says, “yeah, it was good last year, but it sucks compared to (insert thing that will suck next year here).” If you don’t believe that last sentence, re-read this article.

By going out and staking your claim on the web, you’ll be prepared to handle the next big thing–or not–it’s your choice. You can keep all of your content and work and version up when the time is appropriate. When something bigger and better comes along, take your assets with you instead of starting over.

When you are using someone else’s asset, like MySpace, you are subject to the whims of the people running the company and changes in the market.

For example, lots of us had Yahoo! mail accounts and thought they were great until Google came out with Gmail. Now Yahoo! mail sucks. Actually, it doesn’t, but that’s the perception.

The bottom line is that by going out on your own, what’s yours is yours. You are in complete control of everything and are able to change and upgrade with the times.