MOVING UP!

Henceforth, Pickin’ on the Big Ten has a new home at AOL’s Fanhouse. First installment is up. See you over there.

RUMORS OF MY DEMISE

. . . have been greatly exaggerated. But if you just can’t get enough of me, hie thee on over to my flickr page.

CELEBRATING A SMALL VICTORY

While we haven’t made up any ground on Google (boooo!) we are pleased to announce that TBP is now the #1 Phil the Showkiller website on MSN Search.

IT’S THE TRUTH

Some of you know this already, but I’ve started writing for The Truth About Cars, a website I’ve read and loved for the past couple years. My first two pieces are up on the site now. You can read this one about the sad state of domestic-brand subcompacts, or this one about what that first car means to high school kid. I am hopeful there will be more.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Work continues apace on the Pickin’ on the Big Ten season preview, which I hope will be the best ever (not that there’s a lot of competition). While I know POTBT is, as one message-board anonymite put it, “more clever than insightful” (a criticism that fits me as well), I really do put a fair amount of research into it.

The Runs Good site I promised you over a year ago is slowly being bolted together as well. A couple features are in the bag. A couple more long, ambitious features are coming together as well. Summer is a bit of a slowdown time for me; maybe I can find a little more time to write.

And maybe it’ll rain coffee and donuts tomorrow morning at 10:30.

NO ANSWER FOR THE ANSWER GUY

I was all set to write a new Search Engine Answer Guy today. Honest, I was. But in reviewing my searchphrase logs, I rediscovered something I’d noticed before but never bothered to investigate. Namely, I had a lot of search engine hits for ‘phil the showkiller.’

For the uninitiated, Phil ‘The Showkiller’ Ceppaglia is the producer of The Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio, and the former producer of Tony Kornheiser’s ESPN Radio program. Like many radio producers, Phil has been known to get a little air time. He’s a funny guy with a dry, deadpan sense of humor.

The only thing is . . . I’ve never written about him. Until right now, that is. So I have never been able to figure out why I’ve been getting so many hits on his name.

A quick search of Google revealed that, in fact, this website is the #5 result for ‘phil the showkiller’ simply because of a single comment left on one of my many anti-Jim Rome rants. What can I say? Comment spam really does equal Google juice.

Well, I for one am tired of only being on the receiving end of blatant Google voodoo. It simply will not do for The Bemusement Park to be the #5 Phil the Showkiller website. I want to be #1. But I am not willing to resort to shameless Phil the Showkiller Google bombing to make it happen. Rather, I plan to work more Phil the Showkiller content into this site, and I encourage all three of my commenters to do the same. Simple statements like, “I like this post, and I bet Phil the Showkiller would too” should go a long way towards . . . uhh . . . pushing me past Wikipedia and ESPN.com. OK, it probably won’t. This may be the #5 Phil the Showkiller website, but I guarantee we’re prouder of that fact than the top 4. Crikey, ESPN won’t even post a picture of Phil. We certainly would. If we had one. Which we don’t. But if we ever do, I promise we’ll post it. Probably.

I’ve been linked from FARK and Sports Illustrated. I’m cited twice in Wikipedia. I’ve even won a Tuesday Morning Quarterback Challenge. All that remains to make my Internet life complete is for this to become the #1 Phil the Showkiller website on the planet.

But it would be just my luck that he’s at home tonight starting a blog.

EASTER STANDARD TIME

There will be no blogging going on here for the next few days as the family and I are off to visit family. I defy you to notice the difference.

I HERD THIS ON THE INTERNET . . .

Buried ‘neath a defense/well-measured criticism of Dick Vitale by ESPN ombudsman George Solomon is some commentary about a matter that was sweeping through the college football blogs about a week ago. It involves the uncredited use of material from The M Zone on Colin Cowherd’s ESPN radio show. The material, which was hilarious, was sent to the show without a proper attribution as to its source. Cowherd and his staff didn’t vet the material to see if it may have come from some source other than the author of the e-mail.

Solomon justifiably calls a foul on Cowherd, not the first time he’s done so:

A flap over ESPN radio host Colin Cowherd’s use of the “Collegiate Wonderlic Test” for potential NFL players on his March 22 show was the result of a listener e-mailing eight questions from the test to Cowherd without telling him the feature came from the blog, “The M Zone.”

Originators of the blog — created for Michigan football fans — were upset Cowherd did not credit the site.

“When I saw it, there was no attribution, and I thought it came from a listener,” Cowherd explained. “We get dozens of items like that a day.”

Some M Zoners were aggressive and abusive in their e-mail responses to Cowherd, who in turn, retorted by e-mail.

“I should not have responded that way,” Cowherd said. “I should keep what I do on the air. It was my fault.”

Four days later, Cowherd gave The M Zone credit for the item, satisfying M Zone creators.

My take: ESPN’s radio and television hosts need to be vigilant in what they say and report over the airwaves and know the source of what comes over the Internet. And whenever ESPN staffers respond to anyone, via e-mail or postal mail, they, of course, need to remember they’re representing ESPN.

It’s fair and correct to note that Cowherd should be more careful about the origins of any Internet material. But let’s not forget that the original violator of The M Zone’s intellectual property was the person who sent the OSU Wonderlic Test to Cowherd in the first place. By failing to indicate the source from which it was taken, the e-mailer at the very least denied The M Zone its due credit, and (if they sent it with absolutely no attribution) could conceivably be said to have tried to pass the work off as their own.

Again, Solomon’s right to call Cowherd on the carpet for this, and the folks over at The M Zone were well within their rights to complain (though the e-mailers who became abusive were, in my opinion, wrong to do so). But, speaking as one who’s had his own work forwarded back to him without attribution more than once, would it kill you, dear e-mailers, to always include a link back to the source of the material you quote in your e-mails? See what kind of trouble it can cause when you don’t do so?

Highlight/CTRL-C/CTRL-V. That’s all you have to do. But I don’t need to tell you that, since you knew how to quote my stuff in the first place.

OH, LUDDITE THIS

Well, it only took ten days, but I finally got comments working properly. Sheesh.

Is anybody still reading this?

I AM A STRONG PERSON

I just installed WordPress 2.0 all by myself.

Now, if I could just learn to feed myself and tie my own shoes, I’d be ready for kindergarten . . .