What Is All This ESPN "Blog Buzz" Nonsense About?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
ESPN debuted a new feature on Sports Center this morning called "Blog Buzz", and after looking at some of the screenshots at The Sporting Blog....I just don't get it. "Blog Buzz" is a simple concept. You take the Top Five stories on blogs, make a fancy graph, and then add in some quotes. In fact, it's really just using the Sports Media Challenge's Buzz Manager .
While I understand that ESPN is embracing the medium that they once shunned, there is one problem with the new feature....it has nothing to do with blogs. Let's take a look, shall we?
So let me get this straight. ESPN takes the top five stories as provided by the SMC, and then adds quotes from the Sun Sentinel, and one from their own blogger. Ummm, that's not exactly taking into account what "Blogs" are saying, but good try.
ESPN's 'Blog Buzz' Segment Fails Miserably (The Sporting Blog)
6 Comments:
Oh, and the irony of a blogger on the Sporting News website moaning about the ESPN segment not being "indie" enough is crippling.
They mentioned the site this morning (9:50 AM ET).
I love the idea but they are not going in the right direction with this one...probably due to limitations on SMCs part. I just checked out their toolset and it is complete crap. oh and the reason they are quoting those sources is because SMC isn't smart enough to aggregate their own data and their API doesn't provide comments.
Blog Buzz would make more sense if they looked at regular sports fan blogs not written by newspaper or major sports websites, like this blog. Come on now ESPN.
Great effort.
The Sun-Sentinel quote was from a blog on the newspaper's web site (I googled it). And the ESPN quote from their own blogger. Do we have to define the word "blog" further to make "real" bloggers happy?
I think its a stupid idea in general but to get all huffy because they quote the wrong bloggers, in your opinion, seems to be missing the point.