Tag: hockey blogs

 

There isn’t much of a Tampa Bay Lightning blogosphere

Web logging (weblogging), commonly known as blogging, is an open platform of chronicling thoughts, observations or even reporting on issues and incidents as they transpire…with personal opinion and casual presentation mixed in. Blogging became common in the early 21st century (though weblog was coined in 1997) and has since graduated to a co-opted term by the major media; their own online presence is still news journalism but…hey! That “blog” term is so common and popular and all that…!

Blogging is still popular among amateurs, it’s still a casual endeavor (but can turn into one of expectation and dedication) that can attract eyeballs and allows fans/hobbyists/aspiring writers a chance to voice themselves at length at a location that puts their words at the forefront. It’s common in sports – fans have to express themselves somehow – and has its niche with every sports team. Well, most teams…

When an article a retired blogger wrote in 2018 is the 12th result on a web search for “Tampa Bay Lightning blogs”, there’s a problem.

Raw Charge, a Lightning blog I founded in 2009 and is built off my writings from my days as an indie blogger, has lacked a site manager for 14 months. The site is the top listing for Tampa Bay Lightning blog (or blogs) but it lacks site management and thus content (note: There’s someone serving on interim basis and content is on the site, just not what you’d expect from a blog representing one of the top NHL clubs of the past decade). Bolts by the Bay is the second blog that pops up in search results. Part of the FanSidd sports network which is very comparable to SB Nation (the host network for Raw Charge).

News media follows in search results, so do fan forum options. And ticketing. Ticketing is blogging, dontcha know??

I went through 50 entries of Tampa Bay Lightning blogs (and blogs) on Google and didn’t find an independent blog. Mind you, Bolt Prospects (which is certainly a Lightning blog) didn’t show up in search results. (I found out through direct look-up that The Lightning Lounge has ceased and archives o Lightning Shout are unavailable).

My point is folks, that while there is a franchise that is at the top of the NHL in Tampa Bay, it lacks a fan base that aspires to express itself in weblogging…  You can certainly find fans in message foums like Reddit’s Lightning community, or on social media in a group on Facebook or loner-expression on Twitter, but that’s not blogging.

I did the same Tampa Bay Lightning blog search on Lycos. Lycos is one of the elder search engines out there (I once worked in search engine optimization) and can give you a unique result in web searches. Raw Charge, Bolts by the Bay and Lightning Insider (former Tampa Tribune beat writer Erik Erlendsson; it also came up prominently on Google results) were the top results. The fourth result was a Blogspot site that hasn’t been updated since 2008.  That’s…uh… It’s results like that which actually inspired me to start blogging in 2004 — because long-dead fan sites were the lead search results after prominent media.

Bing’s search results for Tamps Bay Lightning blog mirrored results from Lycos. The results for the plural blogs included DRaysBay in top-10 search results. Tampa Bay Rays baseball is decidedly not Tampa Bay Lightning hockey.

This whole subject-matter is on my mind simply because I want to promote Lightning hockey blogs on my link-aggregation/hockey blog attempt at Hockey Daily. I was (and am) trying to follow more individual blots to promote feature write-ups (with intentions to have a place for blog writers to write their own features too). It’s tough to promote Lightning blogs when there aren’t any out there. Or at least not ones with proper search engine context (the joys of HTML and Meta tagging).

It’s a dead zone. While I know there’s social-media networking (interaction on Twitter), it would seem fans have gone to impulse-reaction primarily (via Twitter or Reddit) in order to gain immediate responses from other fans. You can’t fault that as it basically summarizes sports fans in general (action, reaction, socializing) but it also shows a void; a lacking aspiration to be more and be seen further and wider than those who immediately respond. An aspiration to say more and show more and not just have a community respond and react.

August 24, 2019 , , , interweb, Tampa Bay Lightning Comments Off on There isn’t much of a Tampa Bay Lightning blogosphere

Three noteworth Reddit groups for hockey and sports fans

Reddit isn’t just a message board. It’s also not a dump-all marketing destination either. As a long time blogger, I didn’t deliberately try to mine traffic from Reddit because I didn’t want to be the one who posted any of my written-content from my days at Raw Charge on major subreddits. That’s ethics, though. I’ve turned that around in my time moderating on a subreddit devoted to hockey blogs. The subreddit /r/HockeyWriters is devoted to what is basically blog content and hockey authors. I’ve been the one (by way of content submissions from around the hockey blogosphere) to give the group some life.

Yet I can’t do it all. By that I mean I can’t be expected to post everything on the group. Read More

November 8, 2017 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , hockey, interweb, Sports Comments Off on Three noteworth Reddit groups for hockey and sports fans

A hockey blogger Q and A with Lyle Richardson of Spectors Hockey

One of the routine areas that draws fans to the web to find out what they can are rumors. Some are made up, some are hearsay, some are those casually expressed “I’m hearing…” remarks that you see on Twitter from major members of hockey coverage.

The man at the blogging level who made a name for himself and found a firm niche in covering reports on potential player movement in the NHL is Lyle Richardson of Spectors Hockey, who you likely have also seen on such sources as Fox Sports and Bleacher Report among others.

Richadson is another one of the forefathers of the hockey blogosphere, starting around 2003. Want proof? I reposted this article for him during the NHL lockout of 2005, having originally run in November 2003.

While there are a lot of questions still to be had about player movement and eery franchise in the league, the questions are a mix about the man,  blogging, and guys named “Joe” and “Jaromir”.

Read More

August 21, 2017 , , , , , , , , , , , , interweb, Creative Writing, hockey, Interview Comments Off on A hockey blogger Q and A with Lyle Richardson of Spectors Hockey

A place on Reddit to promote your hockey writing

As one of the longest tenured bloggers tied to the sport of hockey (well, at least up until a few days ago when I stopped for the most part), I’d like to take a moment to try to make mention of a category on Reddit where you can have feature content from your blog posted.

If you’re a fan of the NHL or the sport of ice hockey in general, you’re going to go with the no-brainer of /r/hockey, which is the top spot for hockey coverage on Reddit…. and it gets bogged down with at-the-moment coverage, chatter, videos, etc.

Promoting feature writing, though? There’s a subreddit aimed specifically for doing that (though few people are posting within the group) called /r/hockeywriters.  Yeah, the name makes you think that this is specifically for The Hockey Writers authors, but it’s not specifically for them (unless I missed a memo).  It’s to help promote content from hockey bloggers who do feature write-ups on just about any network.

If you’re looking just for feedbavck (and that’s the last post done on the group), it’s probably wiser to post the request on a different group.  If you’re looking to promote a specific write-up you’ve done? Or promote a featured article written that you enjoy (not news — feature article) that sellsyou on the author of the piece, then /r/hockeywriters may be the place to go.

Downside: Only 100 subscribers at this point. That can be remedied, can’t it?

November 1, 2016 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , hockey, interweb, Sports Comments Off on A place on Reddit to promote your hockey writing

A conflict of Pinterest

I’ve been on Pinterest the past few months, using it more to try to spread information / pop culture type items and such than to do what is common: Tout personal photos and wants. Maybe this is a sign how little I know about Pinterest or how I vary from the bulk of Pinterest users, but whatever…

One board I’ve set up is rather generic and yet rather necessary for broadening web exposure. It’s simply touting hockey blogs. That’s playing up the sport of hockey as well as playing up coverage coming from either the media or the fans themselves who drive blog coverage. It’s also a really, really tough feet to accomplish.

There are so many hockey blogs out there; that aspect I’m not trying to play down when I say it’s tough to accomplish what I’m trying. Massive amounts of coverage for the Canadian based teams and other franchises throughout the US (especially northeast market and elder clubs) are not surprising at all. What is surprising is the difficulty of trying to pin said-blogs to the Hockey Bloggers board with thanks to the inability to pin site logos from the individual blogs.

The pin attempts aren’t for specific posts on the sites, it’s linking generically to the sites… And for one coding reason or another I just can’t pin certain site logos (unable, I don’t mean that as by choice). I’m not doing the postings to just show off logos – I make sure to link to the sites and play up what they do in the Pinterest posts – but I’m also trying to play up the individual entity that is the site. What’s better to do when highlighting a web site in general than to show off their site logo?

So, I‘ve got to figure out a way to link to more logos. I’ve been trying to focus on a broader array of blogs than just SB Nation sites (…where the logo pinning is not an issue). At this rate though, I’ll either have to manually download and upload blog logos (which I have in one instance) or wave a white flag and give up on the entire concept.

Whatever the case, there are only 17 blogs listed at this point… And I can tell you quite easily that there is a hell of a lot more out there in hockey blogdom than 16.

August 27, 2016 , , , interweb One Comment »

Hockey blogging and blog aggregation

I used to depend on Hockey Blogs — an RSS aggregation web site — for  one-stop coverage of the web log world for the NHL and the sport of hockey. A decade ago, when there weren’t many blogs but some great blog writing, that site was a killer tool to have, especially during the 2004-05 NHL lockout.

Yeah, and then it got killed because of what it was aggregating. I won’t name names but a certain blog that was doing aggregation of its own got its RSS listed on the site and inundated the page with its shared-content, making it hard to find actual writing efforts from notable blogs of the time. Now it’s even worse as a feed of pro-news sites and another, singular, mass-content blog over-dominates the feed.

I still rely on RSS (Sputnik RSS reader) but one thing  that my RSS reader can’t do is discover other hockey blogs from indie writers. In days of yore, those indie web loggers lusted to get themselves listed on Hockey Blogs.  That doesn’t happen any more.

I don’t know… I once helped run a aggregator aimed specifically at Tampa Bay blogs… Maybe I could start a WordPress powered hockey blog aggregator comparable to Hockeyblogs.org, run independently by someone devoted to the sport? Who knows… It’s tough finding independent blogs these days; SB Nation, Fansided, The Nation Network and Bloguin dominate  with individual sites/blogs, while The Hockey Writers, Today’s Slapshot and a few others try to cover things widely under one franchise/site name.  It’s that one-site, mass content aspect that ruined Hockey Blogs

January 17, 2016 , , , Personal, interweb, Raw Charge, Sports 2 Comments »

In the “Raw”

Being a hockey blogger for five years, I lament the fact I am ceasing publication of new posts at Boltsmag. I plan to keep it (thank you very much, Spammers, for your interest in preying off my property) but right now my concern is elsewhere…

Raw-ly so.

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please draw your attention to the newest blog entry to the SB Nation community: Raw Charge.

March 19, 2009 , , , , , , , , , , , Personal Comments Off on In the “Raw”