Sporting Madness

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Las Vegas for the Blogs With Balls convention and had a great time. There was so much that came out of it that was worth writing about, as evidenced by all the great pieces that have showed up in the blogosphere on the conference since then. You can find most of the recap pieces linked at the official conference site here , and you can also look at parts I , II and III of my series if you're interested. I've been working on a final piece from there since then, but haven't had time to put it up yet, and in some ways, that's probably good, as it gave me time to reflect on it. This is the last official part of the Feat, Loathing and Blogs series, but I'll certainly be touching on some of the panelists' remarks and some of the things that came out of the conference more briefly in future posts as well. This series isn't just about conference recaps, but rather where the sports blogosphere may be going, so I hope it's st...

As part of my ongoing effort to report on the Blogs With Balls convention I've been at for the past few days, I present coverage of the third panel, which dealt with access. This was one of the most interesting panels of the conference for me, as it dealt with a hot topic in the blogging world and one I'm particularly interested in as a journalist/blogger. It was moderated by Dan Levy of the excellent On The DL Podcast , and featured Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo!'s Puck Daddy , one of my favourite blogs, plus Mitch Germann , the vice-president of communications with the San Francisco Sacramento Kings*, John Karalis of the Celtics' blog Red's Army and Patrick Wixted of New Media Strategies (and a former Washington Redskins PR staffer). Here's a shaky cellphone picture of the panel. *Yes, I know the Kings are in Sacramento. Odd things happen when you try to write posts while sleep-deprived, such as mixing up California cities! [Left to right: Germann, Wix...

In the first panel of the Blogs With Balls: Las Vegas conference, the focus was on athletes and their attempts to connect directly with fans. The second panel took up the rather broad topic of "The Future of Sports Media", but produced some really interesting discussions. It was moderated by Dan Shanoff of The Sporting Blog , Tim Teblog and DanShanoff.com . The panelists were Nathaniel Friedman (better known as Bethlehem Shoals ) of The Sporting Blog , The Baseline and Free Darko , Matt Ufford of Kissing Suzy Kolber , With Leather and Warming Glow , Kevin Blackistone of FanHouse , Around the Horn and the University of Maryland, and Amy K. Nelson of ESPN.com . It was a solid, diverse group. Friedman and Ufford both started off as small, independent bloggers (as did Shanoff to a degree, but he wound up with ESPN pretty quickly) who then made it big, while Blackistone's a former newspaper guy who's made the jump to the web, but is possibly most famous for his...