Mitchell Report Tag Cloud
Through my work on ImpactWatch, I spend a lot of time analyzing data. I’m also a pretty big sports fan. Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard that the Mitchell Report on steroids and baseball was released yesterday. Given that, I thought it would be interesting to use ToCloud.com to create a tag cloud showing the words mentioned most often in the report. Here is a quick screen capture of the cloud showing which keywords were mentioned most often.
Here are links to the full tag clouds I created that look at the 300 top keywords:
Upon looking at this initially, the thing that jumped out is that the Players Association and the Commissioner’s Office are mentioned in the report roughly the same number of times. I think this demonstrates how careful Mitchell one in not trying to place too much blame on either party.
Anything jump out at you?
OLPC Giving, and Thanks during Thanksgiving
We’ve written about the One Laptop Per Child project before on The Bivings Report. Now they have launched the Give One Get One promotion running through November 26th. The way it works is for a $399 donation one laptop is donated to a child in a developing nation and one is sent to another child of your choice.
So why is this a big deal? It’s the only way that the public (read you – the "child") is able to get one of these laptops. At first I questioned the motivation for wanting one. Isn’t personal ownership of one of these cool, inexpensive and innovative laptops against the spirit of the OLPC project? These are supposed to be for the kids, right? I especially thought this when I saw this post the other day on Engadget.
But I think when all is said and done this is a good thing. Gadget crazy hackers get a new toy to play with and will probably make it 100 times as awesome as it already is, and a child in a developing nation gets a fantastic learning and communication tool. Plus as part of the promotion you get a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot Access worth $359.98 and a tax write off of $200 for the laptop you gave. It’s a win-win-win-win. Now all they have to do is keep up with production.
Blog Impact at the IPR Summit on Measurement
Back on Oct. 3rd through the 5th Alex and I attended the Institue for Public Relations’ 5th annual Summit on Measurement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Overall the event was fantastic. I spend all day working on ImpactWatch, the media measurement platform created by The Bivings Group, so it was great to meet with a group of 100+ media measurement, media research, and social network gurus.
The session I was most interested in attending was “How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media.” This was a panel discussion including Shel Israel , Kami Huyse , Todd Parsons, Donald McLagan from Compete Inc, and moderated by KD Paine . Unfortunately I set my expectations too high. Not that the session was bad, it just wasn’t what I expected. I think Shel summed it up best when he said that we haven’t been doing this long enough to have best practices “We’re just at the ‘good ideas’ stage.” As such, it seemed like the discussion took a turn towards the merits of doing social media measurement at all. Todd and Donald (and I) think there is absolutely value in it, that’s why we provide products and services doing exactly that. Some thought that it was a waste of time. It was also suggested that the whole point of social media is the conversations it creates which are hard to measure at all. I agree that it’s ideal to have blogs and social networks facilitate conversations and generate engagement, and it is something that is hard to measure. I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. This was confirmed when the audience was asked to raise their hands if they had a personal or corporate blog. Almost everybody raised their hands. When asked if they comment on other blogs, the hands dropped to about a third of the audience.
Most readers are still going to blogs to learn more about subjects they are interested in. They aren’t necessarily interested in joining the conversation. Therefore, many traditional web metrics still apply.
In conclusion, it was certainly valuable to learn that blog measurement is something everybody is still trying to get a handle on right now. In fact, the direction we’re headed with ImpactWatch looks pretty advanced compared to what other folks are doing.
Friday’s Five — 9/21/07: Top 5 Pro Basketball Blogs
I started to write about the top 5 sports blogs, however I feel I wouldn’t do that post justice. The fact is, I grew up in San Antonio, TX, which, in terms of pro-sports, has the Spurs as the only game in town. So for this weeks Friday’s Five I bring you the Top 5 Pro Basketball Blogs using the only metric that makes sense, my opinion.
The Best
Henry Abbott has a background as a journalist and the quality posts on TrueHoop show it. Anybody who loves the NBA and thinks little is happening during the off-season should start reading this blog. The original reason I started reading was very simple, I was tired of getting the same stories about the same things over and over again in the mainstream media. TrueHoop was an island in the storm providing great insight from true basketball fans both in the posts and the reader comments.
When Henry is on vacation or assignment, the backup bloggers, led by Kelly Dwyer , continue the great posts. Recently Dwyer has been doing a series called KD’s DVDs where he goes back into his archive of game film and gives his comments on the games of yesteryear, reminding readers of the epic games that made them become basketball fans in the first place. And all this greatness exists despite the fact that TrueHoop has become part of the ESPN Empire .
The Rest
This is a basketball blog with an “it’s funny ‘cause it’s true” brand of humor. With posts about the trials and tribulations of what to wear and how to survive pickup basketball, and words of the day like “Circus Shot,” it’s easy for a longtime hoops fan to relate. Add in some old school highlights and commercial clips and you’ve got pure gold.
This is a great basketball blog with an even greater basketball podcast. In fact thebasketballjones.net podcast is currently ranked number four in the category of Best Podcast on the Blogger’s Choice Awards.
More and more players are starting to blog their thoughts about basically everything. Gilbert Arenas blogs about his workouts, his games, players, video games, his home life, shoes, and whatever else pops into his head. Arenas is a funny guy and the NBA, who hosts the site, lets him be himself. Anyone in the public eye wanting to start his or her own blog should take a lesson in transparency from Agent Zero.
Team blogs. It stands to reason that a lot of the basketball blogs out there are fans writing about the team that they love. As a Spurs fan, all of the Spurs fan blogs would tie for a place on this list. But there are a lot of other great team blogs out there and several of them are part of the SB Nation blog network. The “recent posts” section combines all of the member site headlines, and if you want to stray, the network also includes baseball, football, college, and the catchall “other” category.
Get ready for the NBA blogs to explode in the coming weeks. Opening night is Tuesday October 30th 2007 .