Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Blogosphere 2005

Everyone's blogging these days. Except when they're inactive.

The Big 6: me, Idris, Alex, Luke, Zaz, Atlanta guys. Luke's is purely personal, but he's often funny, in Luke's way, and he's a presence, so he's in. The others are of general interest, although Alex and I tend to write about our team a lot.

Others to look at: Tim Murray, Hartti Suomela, Jim Biancolo, Marshall Goff, George Cooke (who has made it into ultimatetalk! Attaboy, George.) . Tim has been writing about himself, but the others are trying to do something of more general interest.

I think we'd all agree that we'd like to get more comments, and that people shouldn't be afraid of hogging bandwidth or taking over someone else's blog. They are there to entertain and to provoke discussion, as long as it's not NUA/Z-Boys annoying blather.

Mine is the most read, although Alex would of course argue that it's not because of content but because of name. He also forgot to mention that more people link to me. I often find other blogs by checking out my Referrals on sitemeter.com and see a new one. Also I egosurf once in a while at technorati, but that doesn't seem too comprehensive for the little blogs.

Idris was the first of us to go online, and is often the most refreshingly honest because he's not playing this year and doesn't seem to care if he burns his bridges.

Alex is Jim lite. But please pay him a visit to get his hits up. He has had some interesting retrospectives on Worlds and Tuneup. I think it'd be a good idea to do some more retrospectives, maybe on other tournaments, or on matchups against particular opponents. It seems that most of our recent games against Sub-Zero have been one-pointers, so it'd be fun to look at the ones we won.

Luke is all over the place, talking about skiing or eating pancakes or losing his wallet in a dumpster ten years ago.

Zaz is putting out the best material now, but he'll slow down. I bet he wishes that some of this would have been put in the book, but you don't always think of everything the first time around. Definitely put this on your reading list if you want to improve your team.

Atlanta guys (actual title is "Coaching Techniques") talk about strategy and coaching, with some things like "Chain keeps losing in the finals" and interviews with World Games players.

We all comment on each other's site, too.

Tim Murray, most famous in ultimate for being the victim of my first Callahan, had an interesting inside look at Sub-Zero's very DoG-like victory at this year's Tuneup.

Hartti used to play with the Finnish national team before moving to the Bay Area for grad school 5-6 years ago. He is trying to come up with some improved high-tech stat-keeping and stat-analysis systems.

Jim Biancolo is a Masters player in New England. His blog is one about fitness, with some links and comments on modern research on fitness for "combat sports."

Marshall Goff mixes general commentary with commentary on me and an occasional photography post. Some of his pictures are in the book by Zaz and me (he said one of his friends asked, "Hey, how's your book doing?"). But he talks about Mixed, so.

George Cooke is a late entry. Look for some more insights into the inner backroom dealings of the UPA, since George is the National Mixed Director and was a chair of the World Games Selection Committee, plus he's a helluva nice guy.

PS. Track 4, Jim 3. Made it through this week's workout, running hard to the end despite too high of a heart rate and no one around to call me names for not finishing.

PPS. Started the new job, at the same place that my wife works. We talked about work over dinner tonight. If she starts golfing, we will have NO separation in our lives.


17 comments:

parinella said...

I also meant to mention Eddie Lee, the only other openly conservative frisbee player I know of. He's more of an editor blogger rather than a writer blogger, though, and doesn't talk much about frisbee.

Gambler said...

The only other ultimate-related blog I've come across is called . Perhaps a lofty title, but it's hard to judge with only 5 posts so far.

Maybe I'll start a blog someday since it seems to be the thing to do, but for now I'm sticking to the comments section...

Gambler said...

Clearly I'm not ready for my own blog when I can't even get a hyperlink right...

The blog I was trying to mention is called .

sometallskinnykid said...

Does Zaz have any tips for moving up from a Tier 2 blog to a Tier 1 blog?

Luke said...

it's 'literati' not 'spewers...'

Idris said...

ahh... back when it was me and me 2 friends reading the blog... May '04... now 18,000 hits later [crazy], 25,000 page views [more crazy]... ultimatetalk.com has had 277 visitors so far.

But I fear this is all becoming a 2nd RSD, people get that feeling?

One thing that would definetly help would be separating the ultimate from the pancakes. The history from the lessons. And of course and easy way to sift through the BS.

digg.com uses a system where by users "bump" stories up the ladder.. good stories go up, and by default, bad go down. ultimatetalk.com needs something like that [aside from more than the 60 seconds of work that has been put into it so far]. I forsee a site that pulls from a finite set of blogs/sites [to start] and then allows users to push the cool stuff up and the bad down and also allow inline comments. Bloggers would still retain their autonomy, while contributing to the development of players around the world... I have a dream...

Edward Lee said...

Gwen,

The "preview" button is your friend.

Jim,

I'd bet that there are conservative political opinions in the annals of rsd written by Mike Gerics and/or other NC frisbee players.

Luke said...

idris, the fact of the matter, is that no one listens to the play by play. it's all about the color commentary. Do you really think that cleats are the sweet science?

Idris said...

cleats would by the BS that gets filtered out. there is a time and place for all that is written, I'm not debating its value [i read it], only saying categorizing and priritizing the available information would allow a more efficient means of dissemination.

Idris said...

i'm all about color... but people don't listen to the color commentary of a basketball game hoping a good gnocchi recipe might be brought up... for that, they have emeril's witty banter over on the food network.

Luke said...

dude, people love charles barkley.

Idris said...

agreed... maybe you're our barkeley, though that is giving you WAY to much credit.

odd man out stops posting on their blog?

Adam said...

is it heading in the direction of another rsd, or is it becoming a more public instant messenger chat? This particular thread feels like the latter. Do you guys like that idea? Your smaller group of peers chatting it up... what happens when everyone transitions over to jim's blog and you cant keep up with moderating the crap?

adam

parinella said...

The blog owners can moderate if they feel someone is being a nuisance like anyone from NC.

Another difference from rsd is that the original content is controlled, although the responses aren't. I think there are plenty of thoughtful players out there who would add value to the discussion but wouldn't be caught dead posting to rsd. Including them in the 'sphere, if only to comment, would raise the level, I think.

Marshall said...

Damn. Figured I'd be tier 2 for slow activity and a relative paucity of titles. Didn't see the Mixed slam coming.

Marshall said...

Idris is probably right that the blogosphere could become another r.s.d., only potentially with even more self-indulgence. Hence the importance of separating the wheat from the chaff. Those of us in tier 2 will have to rely on being interesting or friendly enough to earn links from some tier 1's or the growing mass of tier 3's and 4's....

mick said...

Hate to be the fly in the ointment Jim, but you only have a google rank of 3 at the moment... I clicking over at 5... Not that I really write about frisbee... or am actually any good at frisbee... or have anything worthwhile to say at all...

Actually, to tell the truth I don't think that google rank is a good indicator for blogs. I have a rank of 5, and get a modest 20 or so unique hits a day (at least according to site-meter). I know of other blogs with the same rank that are pulling hundreds or thousands of hits a day...

Then again, if you did a search on "frisbee cutting technique" a few weeks ago, I was number 1. Seems to have changed now though.

Oh yea, I also had "motivation phd" and "blog english" for a while. All of these seem to have changed now though, I'm probably not posting enough. Pretty whacky...