Email Story

The Blogdome Atlas

Spotlight Series posted 7/9/2008 from ballhype.com

[By Tom Ziller] 

Inspired by Vanity Fair's recent Blogopticon and my long romance with maps, we decide to stick some of the most well-known sports blogs into a graphical graph graphic.

I present: THE BLOGDOME ATLAS. (Click to enlarge.) 

(As I said, click to enlarge. The large version is prettier. And clickable.)

Some preliminary notes.

- I didn't include your blog because it is too awesome for categorization. Don't get mad.

- This is based on science, not opinion. I would post the formulas for 'sexiness' and 'opinionatedness,' but upon seeing them your heart would explode into song, and you'd probably bleed out. I'm only protecting you by keeping the formulas secret.

Some liminary notes.

- Surprised Deadspin rates as not very sexy? Me too. But science is never wrong. So I tested my personal biases and checked. And hey! Will Leitch's Midwestern sensibilities have made Deadspin fairly staid over the past few years. A.J. Daulerio's big-city bawdry could send this thing to the left fast.

- As it were, 'sexiness' has little to do with the bloggers themselves or their hot CSS and JavaScript skills (with two exceptions). Mostly, it's based on the content. Like, The Big Lead posts a lot of bikini/red-carpet photos, so TBL rates as sexy even though I wouldn't date TBL personally. FanHouse, on the other hand, posts fewer sexy photos or Penthouse Forum letters. As such, it rates as 'not so sexy,' despite the presence of numerous sexy writers.

- The formulas laughed when I fed Curt Schilling's 38 Pitches into the database, and spit out a response which said, "You can't figure this one out yourself, you f---ing lazy moron?" The formulas can be cruel.

Finally, some postliminary notes.

- On the exceptions mentioned in Bullet #2 of the liminary notes: Ladies... and Babes Love Baseball were awarded special considerations by the formulas, which allowed writer sexiness to be included in the calculations. This is good, because the formulas aren't into Joe Mauer.

- In no way is 'sexy' better than 'staid' nor 'informative' better than 'opinionated.' It's all good. I just like stereotyping blogs, that's all. Of course, if Joe Posnanski thinks he's getting slighted and wants to start posting FHM scans in order to be legitimized as more sexy than Dan Steinberg, more power to him. Consider the Bald Blogger Sexy Arms Race on. (Neil Best need not apply.)

- We hope to bring more atlases atlii to you, to complete our full documentation of the state of the blogdome. Got an idea? Thrust it in the comments or email it to me (tom AT ballhype DOT com).