July 2, 2007

Two Reasons I Hate Sports Blogs

By Pete Holiday on July 2nd, 2007

I love blogs and I love sports blogs. I’m a huge fan of getting information from a wide variety of sources and then doing a little thinking on my own to put it all together. There are two things that have been nagging at me for the past few weeks, though.

Countdowns

With all due respect to the guys at Roll Bama Roll and Burnt Orange Nation, the countdowns have got. to. stop. These things are ridiculous. Especially RBRs. We can all count. In fact, those of us who care to see a daily appraisal of how far we are from kick-off will find any number of ways to make that happen. We do not need your daily dose of copyright infringement to remind us. This is especially true in the age of RSS feeds where, were this to become a widespread trend, those of us with interest in a wide range of football blogs would find ourselves spending 15 minutes every morning getting rid of “countdown” posts. In my mind, countdown posts are to the blogosphere in 2007 what blinking text was to the web in 1997.

If you’ve got content every day, feel free to toss a line in at the top “XX Days until Football Season!” but please stop creating entirely new posts whose sole function is to remind us that we’re still 60 days away from football season. Maybe it’s the length that is most annoying. 10 days out I can understand. 80 days out? Bleh.

Needlessly Wordy Posts

There are a number of bloggers who should learn the art of brevity. From time to time, I am one of them. Some people, however, make a habit of wasting everyone’s time. A perfect example is Dawg Sports’ T. Kyle King. Waaaay too many words. His posts could often be condensed to half their length (conservative estimate) without sacrificing any important content. An interesting counter-example is Brian Cook over at mgoblog. He writes some of the longest posts I’ve ever seen, but they are full to the brim with good info, deep statistical analysis, etc.

Of course, unnecessary words tend to produce a market effect. I doubt very seriously that even 10% of Dawg Sports’ readers do more than skim the entries. Even among the hardcore Georgia fans I doubt that percentage approaches a quarter. So maybe, in the end, this sort of thing takes care of itself.

If I could get rid of these two things, my time reading sports blogs this off season would be much more enjoyable.


* Filed under: Blogging

2 Responses to “Two Reasons I Hate Sports Blogs”

  1. PB at BON Says:
    July 3rd, 2007 at 12:35 am

    Hrmm…

    I’m not totally sure how to respond here, Pete. Especially since I like most of the words that you write.

    For starters, I’d note that you just spent a couple hundred words knocking something that (RSS inconvenience to you or not) my Longhorn readers have grown to absolutely love. I’ve not received more positive feedback on a regular feature in ages.

    You may find the whole idea of counting down numbers a bit trivial - which it is - but the posts have been used to touch on all sorts of football-related eccentri which help us all get through the wasteland of football offseason.

    Is it a bitch for your RSS feed? Maybe. Is that a reason for me not to do it? Surely not. At least I’d hope you could respect the fact that I’m writing for Longhorn fans, and not every CFB blogger who may happen to need to scan through my shit each morning.

    Your criticism strikes me as unfair, to put it mildly.

    As for Kyle’s supposed verbosity, I’ll note your right to your opinion and kindly point out that yours is, in fact, in the minority.

  2. Pete Holiday Says:
    July 3rd, 2007 at 8:17 am

    Re: Countdowns: You’re right. There’s a big difference between BON’s countdown and RBRs and it is a bit unfair to lump them together. That said, I still think that the BON countdown is 80% countdown and 20% content. RBR’s is more like 99% countdown. So, you know, if your readers like it, go nuts, I guess. You don’t have to answer to little ol’ me. I just don’t like it. Can’t please everybody all the time.

    As for verbosity… I’d point out a few flaws with using the CFBBA as a barometer in this specific case.

    1. It was a poll so one has to believe that there was some measure of favoritism and bias in the voting. (i.e. it’s a ‘Bama blogger, so I’m going to vote for them!)
    2. It was an internet poll, which immediately makes any claims of mandate questionable. See, for example, the Hot Blogger competition.
    3. Kyle didn’t win, so claims of “majority” are also pretty weak.
    4. Thinking that someone writes good prose and thinking they should write less of it are not mutually exclusive positions. In fact, most of my writing profs in college held that view of me.
    5. This isn’t really about Kyle, specifically. He’s just a good example, so pointing out that he won an award is irrelevant. Especially when the vast majority of the rest of the winners don’t have the same problem with wordiness.

    But, at the end of the day, nobody really has to answer to me. This is just one guy’s opinion. But thanks for the comment, and please accept my apologies for not being appropriately discriminating regarding the countdowns.

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