Turn and face the strange ch..ch..changes

Hello, readers! As you might have noticed, there have been a few changes around here. I'm now part of the excellent TheScore.com Sports Federation, which will be a lot of fun, and have a real domain name to boot (sportingmadness.ca)! Check out some of the other sites in the network if you get the chance; they're all listed by category in the black bar at the top of the page, but I figured I'd spotlight a few of my personal favourites. For you baseball fans, there's a lot of great sites in the network,including Drunk Jays Fans and Ghostrunner on First. For hockey nuts, check out the likes of Down Goes Brown and the Canucks Hockey Blog. In basketball, RaptorBlog and DinoNation are both excellent, and for soccer, there's some terrific stuff over at TFC Connected and Arsenalist. In general sports, Sports and the City is the best comprehensive Toronto sports blog out there and there's some excellent insight into the world of sports at The Tony Ambrogio Experience. If you don't mind sites sullied by my presence as a contributor, there's The 24th Minute, where I live-blog TFC and Vancouver Whitecaps games and chime in with other posts from time to time, and The CIS Blog, your comprehensive source for all things related to Canadian university athletics. Check out the other network sites as well and the great blogs on The Score's homepage.

Anyway, back to this site. The old Blogspot link should redirect, so there shouldn't be any need to change your bookmarks. The roster of sites I'm writing for has also expanded recently; you can find them all in the blogroll at the right, but I'll list them for the fun of it. In addition to my previous gigs at The CIS Blog (Canadian university sports), Out Of Left Field (Canadian perspectives on sports), The Good Point (a multi-sport webmagazine site where I cover the NFL) and The 24th Minute (Canadian soccer), I'm now writing for the sports humour site The Rookies and will soon be making my debut at the excellent Women's Soccer Weekly and the soon-to-be-launched Phoenix Pub. Given that most of my work for these sites is an every-once-in-a-while thing, I'll post links to it here from time to time, but you should definitely check out all of those destinations for the other excellent writers there.

It's an exciting time here, and it's great to be taking this site to another level. The focus is going to be pretty much exactly as it was before, with coverage from a wide variety of sports but an emphasis on going beyond just the surface and developing detailed, nuanced opinions on the big issues in sports, rather than just trying to shout the loudest about why I'm right and everyone else is wrong. If you haven't read it yet, this post on the shades of grey that should be involved in sports analysis is pretty much my mission statement in that area. I'm also a big fan of doing new and interesting things with the site and going beyond the conventional ideas of what a blog can be. To those ends, I'll have plenty of live blogs, Twitter updates (follow me here), interviews and other content here as well. I'm also always open to suggestions on what you'd like to see covered; the readers are what make this site, so I'm always happy to talk about what you like and dislike about it. Leave comments below or e-mail me at andrew_bucholtz [at] hotmail.com. Hope to hear from you! Until then, I leave you in good hands with Mr. David Bowie: