Who do you love?
5
|
Jason posted 8/10/2007 from ballhype.com |
Link love. It makes the sports blogging world go round. It also provides lots of data for the gnomes at Ballhype to chew on, spit out and rearrange into pretty pictures. Example: linking patterns, which we use to help find top stories and are the sole basis for our blog rankings. I've been meaning to perform a linking study for a while now, but Larry Brown's ESPN hypocrisy story from a couple of weeks ago finally provided the impetus to get it done.
For the charts below, I looked at which sites our tracked blogs linked to over the past 90 days. During this period, we analyzed just over 150,000 blog posts and 500,000 links.
First, I decided to group blogger links into 5 categories: mainstream media sites like ESPN.com, sports blogs like Deadspin, official league sites like MLB.com, video sites like YouTube, and reference sites like Baseball-Reference.com. Not surprisingly, mainstream media comprised the biggest slice with 56%. However, sports blogs weren't too far behind, with roughly 1/3 of all links.
I next drilled into each of the categories to find leaders and trends. ESPN continues to dominate among mainstream media sites, although Sports Illustrated has gained ground in the two weeks since LB's post. Note that the ESPN figures don't include the True Hoop or Hashmarks blogs. Here are each of the sites that command at least 1% of the total mainstream media links:
Up next: official league sites. It isn't surprising that MLB.com would lead the way during the summer months, but the extent of its domination over the other sports is noteworthy (59% for MLB.com, and 75% if you throw in Minor League Baseball). Besides the seasonality, it's boosted by the fact that there are a lot more blogs out there dedicated to baseball than other sports (at least in the English language). MLB.com is also arguably the cream of the crop of league sites, and it certainly produces a ton of content (e.g., two takes on every game recap, speed and trajectory data for every pitch).
Ballhype tracks video from a number of different providers: YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, Uncut Video, Break, Funny or Die, Brightcove, Photobucket, Heavy, and The Onion. But for all intents and purposes, video linking and embedding is a one-horse race, with YouTube commanding 90% of all linked clips.
Finally, ESPN's overall dominance makes it a good candidate for an additional breakdown. I combined links to both the mainstream news site as well as its blogs, then grouped them by section. For factors mentioned previously, seeing MLB in the #1 slot isn't too surprising. The NBA also benefited from the fact that it was in season for a portion of the period analyzed.
Warrants mentioning: Bill Simmons is obviously a force by this measure, with 39% of the Page 2 links (and 4% of total ESPN links) going to Sports Guy's World. But according to sports bloggers, Henry Abbott has surpassed Simmons in the WWL's online pantheon—with True Hoop receiving almost twice as many links over this period.
I decided against including any general blog-to-blog links analyses here, mainly because that kind of thing is covered by our blog rankings. However, I do plan to perform more studies like this going forward, so leave a note if there are other areas you'd like to see researched.
Tags:
Other
ESPN
Bill Simmons
Comments (19)
-
-
Jason A couple of clarifications regarding your two questions:
- This study was not about the linking tendencies of any individual blog. With 2k blogs and 500k links, the impact of any one of us was negligible. I do think you're missing a point about True Hoop, however ... whether a linked story is "easily found" is irrelevant to anyone who doesn't make it a point to read every last "easily found" NBA-related article.
- This post didn't address the context of links ... I'll investigate that next time to see if there's any interesting data available. I'd caution against using these charts to make inferences about how many blog posts lack commentary, however. Also, check out the Larry Brown post mentioned above--its thesis was the complain-vs-link contradiction you're describing.
-
tziller "whether a linked story is "easily found" is irrelevant to anyone who doesn't make it a point to read every last "easily found" NBA-related article."
That's the important thing. Especially for a lot of us team bloggers, we serve the role of not just analyst or commentator, but aggregator. Not every Kings fan has the time, energy, or whatever to go look at all the rumor pages every morning, check the news sites obsessively, and read all the NBA blogs. Luckily, a lot of my readers email in links to Kings-relevant stuff. It's a service to the readers to post whatever we find, whether it comes from ESPN or the Nunavut Daily News. (I'd add one of the reasons True Hoop became a must-read for me two years ago is because if there's something really important written about the NBA, Henry has it on his blog. It's more than a function, it's a feature.)
Blogging isn't the same for everyone.
-
BullsBlogger spot on, tom. Plus if you're commenting on something you've read, you should link to it whether it's easily found or not.
Also, as much as bloggers give ESPN crap (and rightfully so), their .com NBA coverage is actually excellent.
If they didn't want to feed the beast I'd suggest not linking 'the .com' for stuff like box scores, AP stories, and other things are replicated elsewhere
-
matt Honestly, I refresh TrueHoop far more often than I hit up ESPN's front page or even their NBA page, and I'm guessing there are a lot of people like me (especially those who subscribe to TrueHoop's RSS feed).
There are a lot of easily accessible articles on ESPN's main pages that aren't necessarily worth my time to read. But nine times out of ten (more than that, really), if Abbott links to it, it is worth my time. He's a helluva writer, but he's also one outstanding filter.
-
-
-
truehoop I was out of town and just saw this thing. Very cool how you can slice and dice everything, Jason. Thanks. Interesting.
And I second everything said in the comments about the power of aggregation.
I also think it's totally useful and powerful to write "this is a great article" with a link. It's like a DJ saying "here's a great song." The gift you give is in reading a ton and being up on things so that you can say that out of everything out there, this one stands out.
David Friedman is like a trumpet player, coming along and saying, hey, how come everyone likes this DJ, when he can't play the trumpet at all? Sometimes people want someone to connect them to the best in trumpet playing. It's a different job.
Beyond what that short post with a link does for readers, it also really helps google (and sites like BallHype) identify what's good, important, and new.
That's why the defense agencies are trying to get intelligence people to link to important stuff from their own secret blogs on their own secret intranet -- it's a great way to pluck the good stuff out of a nearly limitless information landscape. Here's a big article about that. Linking to what's good is important part of what makes the internet work well, and I think that deciding not to link to major, obvious stories does everyone a disservice.
For instance, it may be that established star Bill Simmons is way more popular than upstart TrueHoop. The traffic numbers of the two sites, I assume, would indicate that in spades.
But everyone might assume that everyone else is already reading essentially everything Bill Simmons is writing, and not link to it for fear of seeming redundant. (I confess, I do this sometimes.) A good find on that upstart TrueHoop that you read once in a while, though, might be worth crowing about.
But then you're telling less clued-in readers, and google etc, that TrueHoop is more interesting to you than Simmons when in fact, in terms of your real actions, the opposite is true.
-
BullsBlogger Henry, I like that trumpet/DJ analogy.
It truly is different things, and bloggers can provide their own commentary as well as the implicit approval that a link signifies. That's commentary in itself, right?
I think as the sports blogosphere has exploded, the bigger (or louder) problem is that there's too many who think they can play the trumpet, and stink at it.
Not you David, your stuff is good. Even good enough to link to sometimes :).
-
-
David Friedman I just noticed that some more comments had been added here.
I never played the trumpet, although I did play the saxophone back in the day. If we're going to use a musical analogy, though, I'd compare what I'm doing to what Prince does: one performer playing many different instruments and styles; in terms of 20 Second Timeout, this means conducting interviews with people ranging from Top 50 players to forgotten ABA stars to current All-Stars to various writers (Gus Alfieri, Filip Bondy, Bill Woten, etc.), doing statistical analysis (of both historical and contemporary players), writing detailed game stories and examining the history of the game.
Regarding some of the other points mentioned, I still find it hard to believe that people could not find Simmons without links being posted to his articles or that google or anyone else would somehow come to the conclusion that he is not heavily read if such links were not made. His work is published on a huge corporation's website and I think that the least of his concerns is that it is not getting noticed.
A lot of the writing at ESPN is good (and some of it is not) but I doubt that anyone is having trouble finding it. The analogy to how intelligence services sift through information does not apply, because those agencies are dealing with massive amounts of information that may not be available to other agencies; again, no one is having trouble finding Simmmons, et. al.
-
David Friedman A comment that has been given a negative rating--I don't post a lot of comments here but that must be an achievement of sorts. I suppose if I had posted links to the various articles I mentioned that the comment would have been more well received, but I stubbornly believe that anyone who is interested can click on 20 Second Timeout and find the referenced items :)
I understand a team blogger making a post that contains every article and blog post that pertains to his team--what Tom calls being an "aggregator." In my 20 Second Timeout post "What is the Purpose of a Basketball Blog?" I mentioned that Golden State of Mind did a great job of that during the playoffs--they linked to a ton of stuff AND provided some commentary/perspective on many of the items. I thought that was really cool.
Maybe someone can read the N.Y. Times article that Henry cited in his comment and explain the relevance of the analogy that he made. The intelligence services discussed in the article are trying to figure out how to share obscure bits of information that may only seem significant when they are grouped together--such as, the movements to and fro of various individuals, the fact that said individuals were in contact with people who were learning how to fly planes (but not land them), etc. These pieces of information were literally needles in a haystack but if you pluck out enough of the needles then you might be able to sew together something coherent. Interesting stuff--but what does that have to do with posting a link to something that is literally one or two clicks away from the page that it is being mentioned on? ESPN has a main NBA page that displays all of the most recent NBA-themed articles from the site, even ones written by writers who don't always or exclusively write about the NBA. Doesn't that page effectively serve the same purpose that Henry does by linking to ESPN articles? Or is the primary point of the linking, as Henry suggests, to boost those articles' rankings in search engines? That clearly is a valuable service to the writers but it is less clear whether that best serves the readers, who might be more interested in some of the other things that Henry has the time to read but decided not to mention. A casual NBA fan who drops by Henry's blog is more likely to have the time to go to ESPN's NBA page and see what's up than he is to sample the dozens of blogs, newspapers and other sources of information that Henry reads. Put it like this: if Simmons wrote a reasonably good column and writer X for the Podunk News wrote an interesting article, which item is the casual True Hoop reader more likely to find on his own? Simmons is next door to True Hoop, while Podunk News is off the map. Maybe Podunk News only produces one good article every six months but national readers may never know about it unless someone like Henry points it out. I suppose the answer to this is that Henry has included all of the good Podunk-type articles plus provided the additional service of pumping up the ESPN articles.
OK, maybe once in a while there is an ESPN piece that is so exceptional that even though it is easily found it merits special mention--but if ESPN articles get this kind of "special mention" regularly then one has to either believe that these articles really are better than everything else that is out there (maybe Henry really does believe that--and maybe it really is true) or one becomes somewhat numb to the whole thing. It's like how the term "breaking news" has become overused on television to the point that it hardly gets one's attention now.
That's my take. Others are free to disagree--and, apparently, many do...
-
matt I disagree with several things you've said, but here's one of the main things:
"A casual NBA fan who drops by Henry's blog is more likely to have the time to go to ESPN's NBA page and see what's up than he is to sample the dozens of blogs, newspapers and other sources of information that Henry reads."
I'm the hardest of hard-core NBA fans (and a professional blogger who spends all day in front of a computer) and even I don't always have the time to read ESPN. Just because something is in the mainstream media doesn't mean it has caught my attention -- there's a lot of good NBA material produced by ESPN, SI, FOX Sports and Yahoo ... and that's not even talking about the major daily newspapers, let alone hundreds of blogs.
Yes, all of it is extremely easy to find if you take the 3-4 hours to read it all, but most people don't have the time. I don't read every single item in the TrueHoop bullets, but I scan them daily and almost always find 3-4 things I wouldn't have otherwise seen (and seriously, it takes a fraction of a second to skip over things I already have seen). I'd be very disappointed if Henry started selectively dropping things just because he thought "I should have had the time to find it myself."
-
-
-
truehoop It is right to assess the evolving relationship between big and little media organizations.
When I worked in the network radio newsroom at CBS, when "podunk news" had a story we didn't, our unspoken mandate -- and essentially the mandate in every newsroom to this day, as far as I know -- is to reverse engineer the news item in question, to that it can be carried without attribution to a competing brand. Only with great reluctance would a CBS radio broadcast cite another news gathering organization by name. I could show you examples of this kind of non-attribution in articles and broadcast stories every day.
(If you're fired up about people not respecting podunk news, this is the place to direct your anger.)
Since joining ESPN, TrueHoop has stumbled into the position of becoming one of several leaders in changing that arrangement. Here we are, on ESPN.com, telling you to go to podunk news! In addition, we are virtually blind to both the corporate affiliation and the size of the source. I get emails all the time from people saying, essentially, thanks so much for telling me about podunk news. I read it all the time now!
If some traidtional rival of ESPN.com has the best story on any topic, that's the version I'll encourage you to read. Ditto if it's on a free blogger blog that a college freshman started last week. I'm searching for quality, period. And when I find it, I both link and (if I quote) give credit by name, which makes it extremely rare among corporate-backed news instruments. (Less so, with the passage of time, though, which I find pleasing.)
It's pretty bold of ESPN to do that. It's like the IBM website linking to Apple.com. Or the Microsoft website linking to Linux.
You see this pretty bold experiment, however, in which ESPN directs readers to rivals, and are bitter that the blog would EVER link to ESPN? I find it a little mystifying, but we need not agree on everything.
In the meantime, I'll keep reading everything good I can find about the NBA every day. And when I find something that rings my chimes, I'll link to it -- wherever it is.
-
Erin I'm like Matt in that the more time I spend reading blogs, the less time I spend on the home pages of the major sports sites. So if there are really good blogs that stay on top of the best stories, regardless of source, I appreciate both the link and getting their opinion on it, even if it's just a phrase or two. From a blogger's perspective, linking also establishes the basis for having a conversation with your readers about the topic. It shouldn't matter if the story was easy to find elsewhere or not.
-
David Friedman I posted a comment here a few hours ago and it appeared on the site but now it has vanished. Was it removed for some reason and, if so, why?
All I said in the new comment was that I never said that Henry should refrain from ever linking to ESPN stories. I said that I personally don't understand why this is a great service to the reader, though it is apparent that several people disagree with me on that score. I also stated that, in my opinion, if Henry frequently links to the same ESPN authors then this implies that they are significantly better than other authors who are writing about the same topics (which may very well be true) but that it could also have the unintended effect of being the equivalent of a tv station overusing the phrase "breaking news" (perhaps I am the only one who feels that way about either of these things).
In reviewing other people's responses to this topic, it seems to me that my reading habits are actually more similar to Henry's than they are to the other posters--we both are reading a lot of different sources of information; Henry chooses to post links to a lot of these, while I center most of my posts around one particular theme that I look at in depth. So for readers who do not have the time/incllination to visit a lot of sites, Henry is their "aggregator" (to borrow Tom's word).
I still don't get the analogy to the N.Y. Times article...
-
tziller (I'd encourage people not to vote down comments they merely disagree with; this is a conversation worth having.)
David, I guess what I'm seeing from your argument at this point is that link aggregation can be helpful in your eyes -- you cite that terrific GSoM run (which was made possible using Ballhype's team categories, I might add). Your problem seems to be that Henry links to ESPN stories. Honestly, the inclusion of ESPN stories in the 'Bullets' and in full posts doesn't take anything away from us who already read ESPN. As Matt said, it's nothing to scroll past something you've already seen, as much as it's simple to scroll past something you aren't interested in. It may not add value for you, but it adds value for numerous people (myself included -- finding all the content on the ESPN NBA page isn't exactly simple; there's quite a bit of stuff that's hidden to me until I come across it linked elsewhere).
I think it's telling that ESPN gets the abuse it does in blogs, yet only one person is railing against this practice.
-
David Friedman I would not say that I am "railing against this practice." I simply do not perceive it to be as useful as other people do but, as I indicated, this seems to be a function of the fact that my reading habits apparently resemble Henry's more than they resemble those of other bloggers, even though my posting style (usually consisting of one subject looked at in depth) differs from his (often consisting of links to many different items). If people really find ESPN's main NBA page so difficult to navigate that they need Henry to select which articles are worth reading then that suggests fodder for a different discussion. For what it's worth, I don't find ESPN's main NBA page that difficult or time consuming to navigate.
-
-
Erin Hi David-
We didn't receive any other comments from you yesterday ... is it possible that you clicked the Preview button instead of Submit Comment? (I've done that a few times...) If not, send us an email and we'll try to reproduce.
-
David Friedman I was pretty sure that I hit "submit" but it certainly is possible that I clicked "preview" instead. I don't need to send an email to you about this because my most recent comment includes the essence of what I said in the missing comment. I just wanted to make sure that my comments were not being intentionally deleted for some reason.-
Erin No worries then - we've never deleted a user's comment that I can recall. If someone were to post something truly offensive/racist/abusive/etc., maybe we would consider it but for the most part the community is really good about having productive debates without requiring intervention - case in point! That, and user voting takes care of comment moderation if needed.
-
-
-
-
JonMVNbasketball I definitely think Henry's work on TrueHoop is much more valuable than any ESPN "Insider" material because in my opinion, if the Insider information was truly valuable (meaning worth my time), it would be more accessible with front page visibility. I'm not a cover-to-cover kind of reader.
Links (5)
Happenings and Mishappenings: How'd He Get That High?
Published 8/10/2007 by Luke Halpert at Nyjer Please
... Who do sports bloggers link to the most? - Ballhype ...
True Hoop > Bill Simmons
Published 8/10/2007 by TZ <info@sactownroyalty.com> at Sactown Royalty
... Jason Gurney of Ballhype investigates linking patterns among sports bloggers. I need to start linking to the State Hornet more, so here's goes nothing: ...
Rain, Rain, Go Away Roundup
Published 8/10/2007 by The Sports Culture at The Sports Culture
... WHO’S YOUR DADDY: Ballhype research department at its finest hour; a thorough examination of our linking trends. ...
Cheap Shots #55: Pre-Season NFL Time Means Training Camp For Your Appetite.
Published 8/10/2007 by Signal to Noise at Signal to Noise
... The Ballhype folks keep doing more stat analysis: this time, it’s on where bloggers link to for stories, as an extension of Larry Brown’s ESPN hypocrisy post. [BallHype] ...
Morning Paper: Dennis Green Is Back
Published 8/11/2007 by Larry Brown at Larry Brown Sports
... A follow up to my hypocritical bloggers story, an analysis of linking [Ballhype] ...
There are two things that I don't understand, both of which I touched upon in my August 2 post at 20 Second Timeout titled "What is the Purpose of a Basketball Blog?" One pertains to how frequently Abbott posts links to ESPN content--Simmons, Hollinger, etc.--that is literally only one or two clicks away from his blog. If one has found Abbott it would be almost impossible to not find Simmons and the other big ESPN.com writers. Abbott's response to that is that he only links to items that he thinks are really good and that he links to a lot of non-ESPN content, which does not address the fact that he links to a lot of ESPN.com items that are easy to find anyway. My point was not that he is linking to bad content but that he is linking to easily found content. I thought the idea of linking is to say "Look what I found" as opposed to telling us about things that are easy to find anyway.
The second thing that I don't understand is graphically illustrated in your post: 56% of the links here are to mainstream media sites, with ESPN.com being number one. I have nothing against ESPN.com. I go there frequently and obviously so do a lot of other people. What I don't get is why bloggers make so many posts that consist of nothing more than a link to an easily found ESPN.com story, with no commentary of their own. I am apparently literally in the minority here but I would find it much more interesting to read a blogger's take on something--be it an ESPN.com article or anything else--than to sift through links to stuff that is easy to find. I understand linking to something that is unique--but how come five minutes after something appears on ESPN.com so many people feel compelled to post a link to it? There does seem to be a contradiction between so many people complaining about ESPN and so many people almost obsessively posting links to ESPN.com, although I suppose it is possible that the complainers are not the "linkers" and vice versa.