Thursday, August 16, 2007

Digging for sports

I noted yesterday that one of the most dugg stories on Digg was a Fox News Report covering the Jonathan Lee Riches lawsuit of Michael Vick.

I'm not going to go into the low level of journalism exhibited in the article. 100% Injury Rate does that well enough.

This is going to be about the general ineptitude of the Digg community when it comes to sports.

I recognize that the Digg community and perusers of sports blogs are probably very disparate groups. I also might be biased because I usually take issue with a lot of things said on Digg. However, this story was barely news three weeks ago when every sports blogger alive (including me) posted about it.

The title of the Digg story is "Michael Vick outed as Al Qaeda operative, sued for 63 zillion dollars," which means that he (I can only assume) missed the inherent humor in someone being sued for 63,000,000,000.00 billion dollars. Nevertheless, the diggers ate the story up, propelling it to its current mark of 2354 diggs.

I would have dugg this story had it been submitted on the July 27 even with that gaff, but is it even news now?

This wouldn't be too bad if it didn't happen so often though.

Three weeks ago, there was a story listing the "Top 50 Basketball Players of All-Time", which garnered almost 500 diggs despite listing Lebron and D-Wade at 29 and 30 respectively and Dirk at 26 while greats like Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, James Worthy, and Bill Walton went unranked.

When Bonds broke the record, TIME had a slideshow of Barry through the years, which was dugg 844 times. Almost 12 hours and 40 comments passed by before anyone pointed out (I was the first to) the bogus stat that TIME calls "Runs per at bat." His rookie year, Barold apparently scored 25.8 runs per at-bat, a record for sure as I don't know anyone else who has scored more than 1. I clarified that they probably meant "At bats per home run," which isn't an honest mistake by any means and I can't believe that slipped by the editors, and I was dugg down at first.

I realize that a good number of legitimate sports bloggers frequent Digg. I assume that Hank Worrell of WTB does by the "Digg This!" button on some of his posts. I assume that WCK at 100% Injury Rate is as well, since sometimes (not often) his posts mirror stories that are in the most dugg section for the day. Let me say that I have nothing but the utmost respect for these two as they represent what I am striving to become. However, it pains me that the majority of the Digg public is that clueless about things.

Alright, I'm done ranting for the night. I feel like this is the type of post that doesn't lend itself to comments, but maybe if you feel like you'd like to share similar experiences, by all means do so.

As a little sidenote, Google Analytics tells me that someone actually came to my site after googling "barold lamarcus bonds." I don't know why or how this happened. Maybe it actually is his real name. Or maybe they particularly enjoyed those two posts of mine. I'm hoping for the latter.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen, amen. Our site got a huge bump from searches for jonathan lee riches after the Fox article. It's amazing that there are still people who get their news-- scratch that, that there are people, period, who get their news from Fox News. Just a bit ahead of the market.

h said...

I totally agree with you on this post Loren. The Digg Sports section has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. It is awful. The people that use Digg are not a sports-centric crowd, and the sports stories that are highly Dugg are almost universally terrible. I have talked with some other bloggers, and the consensus is that Digg is pretty much useless for sports. It is great for a lot of other topic areas, but for sports sites like BallHype and Yardbarker are much better. Good post Loren, I enjoyed it.

100% Injury Rate said...

We had a ludicrously slow day the day we posted the Slip 'n Slide story. It was the only cool thing we could find, and we posted it before it blew up on Digg. Sometimes you have to post absolute crap. But at least it was reasonably entertaining crap. I hope.

100% Injury Rate said...

Wow, I just saw how many Diggs it had. We posted the story when it had i think 22 Diggs. Deuce beat us to the pie-eating bike contest, so I couldn't post on that. Mmmmmm, pie.

Loren said...

@peiler
Yeah, I got a lot of search requests for Jonathan Lee Riches over the past couple days. It didn't come close to matching my Alyssa Milano stretch (idk what fueled that other than overactive libidos).

@Hank
I tend to not use these syndicates for sports news since that's what I have google reader for. However, when a sports story appears on the top ten or in the upcoming list, I feel compelled to check it out only to be disappointed with them every time. If I wanted uninformed competitive bantor, I'd watch ATH. I kid, I do watch ATH from time to time)

@WCK
I wasn't calling you out for using Digg stories; on a lot of topics, they are really interesting. I was just using you as an example of a digger that knows what he is talking about and whom I have no problem with. The vast majority though lets me down a lot. My friend's dad who is a neurosurgeon is actually going to compete in the pie-eating bike contest, so I hope that goes well.