If you are remotely sports-minded, the timing of this post is probably a bit too on the nose. The US Women's National Soccer Team just played what may have been one of the most exciting, frustrating, and ultimately American games of soccer ever played. However, these thoughts have been percolating around in my brain for a bit, and the game yesterday just crystallized that my premise is right.
For the average American, the Women's World Cup is a more interesting soccer tournament than the men's, and might be the event necessary to get your average American sports fan to watch soccer.
Image from the NY Times (I think)
With almost any other sport, Americans will not accept the women's version. Volleyball and gymnastics might be the exception, but those are not major sports and Americans will only care about them every four years.
But Women's soccer, particularly this team in this event, might help soccer catch on for the rank and file fans who generally spend their year moving from their local baseball team to football Sundays to the NBA and NHL playoffs. They might now spend a morning watching a Premier League game, or tune into a Men's national friendly.
The World Cup is played at a high enough level that the average fan can see it's a skilled sport. This, alone, doesn't seem like anything particularly insightful. The World Cup, an international event that, like all good international events, plays on patriotism and jingoism to get you artificially behind a team you didn't know existed two days ago. When you turn on a Women's World Cup game, you can tell you're watching something important. The same thing goes for the Men's World Cup. Or the Olympics. Or your average EPL or [insert other league here]. Pretty much anything other than MLS. Americans like the best. The World Cup is the best.
The players in the Women's World Cup are not as good as their counterparts in the Men's event.Now we are getting somewhere. While this doesn't sound like a positive, it is in this case. The Men's World Cup is full of supremely talented teams who don't play together enough. That leads to a very conservative game, a game that is spent almost entirely in the midfield, touch passes, reversing field, methodically moving the ball, probing for a weakness in the defense. Occasionally, you'll get a run by an offensive minded player, followed by a counterstrike by the defense, and then another 30 minutes of midfield play. It is this play, the generically boring, possession-based offenses, that bores your average American to death.Top leagues like the English Premier League, or really, any of the UEFA leagues, aren't like this. They have inventive and interesting offense, and a game that has a tremendous amount of back and forth. This is because these teams play together (basically) year round. They know each other, and their opponents, and they aren't in what amounts to a single elimination tournament. But, they're also foreign, with odd chants, and odd names, and few Americans.
The Women's World Cup finds a niche the Men's doesn't. The players are great, but not so good that they have the ability to control the ball for minutes at a time. There are many more turnovers, fewer successful passes, and this leads to a significant amount of offense. Teams make runs all the time. The ball travels from one keeper to the other keeper in seconds, not in minutes. It is a less precise game, and, therefore, becomes far more interesting.
The Women's National Team is good; The US Men's National Team isn't.And here's where our patriotism kicks in. Your average fan, when turning on a Men's National team game, particularly against any nation that isn't found in the Caribbean, can tell that the Men's team is in for a fight. Or, worse yet, in for a drubbing. They just aren't that good. Someday, that might be different, but it's not different today. Americans do not like cheering, or watching, a team lose. So, instead, we just don't watch.But the Women's team is one of the best in the world--or possibly, the best in the World. They won the Cup in 1999 (which almost everyone remembers), and have been consistently good. When you turn it on, you know you're watching a team that can win.
(Why didn't soccer catch on in 1999 after the Women's team won the World Cup? Well, it did, a little. But, mostly, because it was 10+ years ago without 10+ sports networks, HD cable, and online video. You had to struggle to watch soccer in 1999. Today, you can turn on ESPN and have a broadcast of the Premier League that is done specifically for the American audience.)
The best teams in the world, playing an exciting (if sloppy) brand of soccer, in the biggest tournament in the world, and the American team has a shot at winning. This is why Women's soccer might turn Americans on to watching soccer on TV. Yesterday's 2-2 Penalty Kick victory over Brazil might have been the tipping point. It had everything Americans love, and rather than rehash that, I'll point you to American McCarver's recap of the game.
This tournament, particularly if the US team can beat France and move into the finals, might be enough to get fans to check out another soccer game. If ESPN is smart, they'll start showing recaps of Premier League games, pitching the upcoming EPL season, and pointing hungry soccer fans towards something besides MLS. Americans simply are never going to get behind MLS. We don't watch second rate leagues (at least not in large numbers). Hardcore soccer fans will watch MLS the way hardcore football fans watch the CFL or Arena league: they just like the sport and will do anything to watch it.
Casual fans, hooked by this Women's World Cup (and, in particular, this team), should be spoon fed EPL games, in hopes of growing a larger, American soccer audience. This time, it might actually work.
Google has removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are far too "spammy".
The .co.cc space is not an officially authorised second-level domain like .co.uk or .com.au. Rather, it's offered independently by a Korean company (http://co.cc/) that just happens to own the domain name .co.cc.
Huh, why would a company want to offer a fake registry? It's not like .co.cc is particularly attractive TLD.
The .co.cc "registry" offers single sub-domains for free, and enables customers to bulk-register 15,000 addresses at a time for a mere $1,000, or about seven cents a name.
Oh, I get it. It's so they can sell thousands and thousands of domains to spammers and phishers hoping to avoid the Google Ban Hammer (or to avoid Cloudmark or any other spam services).
Good for Google. It's pretty ballsy to dump 12 million websites/domains from your results. Now, just start dumping any site that puts up more than one AdSense block on a page, and we'll be in business.
Unfortunately we have some lost some files hosted within the file forever server. We have tried to recover as many files as possible however, some have been permanently lost. If you are still missing files on your account, please contact our support team by submitting a support ticket. We will provide refunds for any files that were paid for and lost."
I generally like DreamHost, but that's a little funny, right?
They may want to rename that service to "FilesForAWhile" or "FilesForeverInLittleKidTerms".
I thought this was pretty amusing too.
Is it any coincidence that just hours after Mensa went down, FilesForever ceased being aptly named?
On June 8th, Bill Simmons launched his latest ESPN endeavor: Grantland, a sports and pop culture site. "Wow!", you say sarcastically, "isn't that exactly what Page 2 is?"
Yes, yes it is.
But Grantland is more than Page 2, for a few reasons:
It is focused on long content, not just short attention grabbing blog posts
It has attracted a really solid set of known writers (Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, Dave Eggers) and lesser-known writers (Bill Barnwell, Katie Baker)
It's not plastered in ESPN's incessant branding and cross-promotion
At the core, Grantland seems to be an attempt to prove that if you generate good, sustainable content (even if it might be magazine article length) that the audience will come. And that makes Grantland a noble endeavor.
So, after two weeks, how does Grantland look? Let's start with the bad.
As a web property, its design is, well, I don't want to say excruiatingly bad, but it's pretty bad. The layout with new content appearing at the top is reasonably blog like, but without any of the markers that give you a clue about what's new since you last visited (or even just what's new today). The intermingled blog content (where sometimes it seems blog posts make the front page, but other times they don't) adds a bit of confusion.
Those are reasonably minor quibbles.
The site itself looks like it was designed in 1997. That's ok, I think, since they're going for the old-timey media feel (or at least I think they are). Except it ends up looking pretty ass-like when you end up with a giant Subway or Klondike ad in the middle of a page.
The use of footnotes (which is a Simmons favorite) is fine. The footnotes showing up in the right column, in line with the reference is a clever idea that sounds better than it works, especially if you use a service like Instapaper or ReadItLater (perfect for the longer content of Grantland). Footnotes are called footnotes for a reason -- the bottom of the page is *always* the bottom of the page.
Oh, and no full text RSS feeds. Seriously, it's 2011.
However, the the poor-to-middling site design can be completely overlooked if the content is as stellar as I think the team at Grantland wants it to be.
So far, sadly, the answer to that is that it is not uniformly great. But there have been some bright spots. Some truly, supremely, worth the experiment already bright spots.
Tom Bissel's incredibly thoughtful, "review as commentary on society" review of the video game L.A. Noire was the first article on the Grantland site that really met the high bar the Simmons' team is aspiring too. There are almost no mainstream outlets that would devote 5000 words to a review of a video game, unless it ended with the conclusion that they cause all of society's ills.
Charles Pierce's recollection of his time at The National is just the sort of well-written piece that doesn't really get written any more, or if it does, it's on some backwater blog that you hope you catch a link to on a Twitter. And it really was the perfect entree into what is probably Grantland's signature piece, to this point, the Tom Shales-ian oral history of The National.
The oral history piece does a few amazing things that I can't imagine flying on ESPN. It allows some ESPN folks to crap on other ESPN (and non-ESPN folk). It spends thousands of words reliving the days of a long departed sports daily. It makes it interesting.
If Grantland can launch one or two of these pieces a quarter (and, it's somewhat telling all 3 of these hit in the first couple of days), then it may not just be a vanity outlet for Bill Simmons, but instead a place where long-form content can go and actually be read.
If Grantland has more of the, let's say, spotty content that has filled its "pages" since the launch, I think it'll end up as just another Page 2. I'm hoping that the Chris-Jones-and-Wesley-Morris-like articles (two authors who I have enjoyed elsewhere), where we take a simple sports topic and try to turn them into something more poetic (or simply, purely, less readable), find their way to an editor who can reign them in.
Ironically, that editor may be Bill Simmons, and that hasn't proven to be one of his strong points.
I'm actually hopeful that each month Grantland will spit out a couple of "I'll read that once a year" articles mixed in with a few "did ya read that one yet" articles you share with your friends. Mix in a slightly better site design and I think it'll be a success.
By success, here, I mean something I'll go to and know that I'll be able to grab a good article or two to read on a plane or subway ride (or more likely, on the shitter). I'm not sure, beyond the Bill Simmons articles (which have lost some of their sheen when put next to better writers) that there's an audience for the site, but I'm really hoping I'm wrong. (I'd love to see what their webstats look like.)
There should be a place in this world for a site like Grantland.
Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: "As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link’s health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television."
Aahhh. So awesome.
Notification Center: "You get all kinds of notifications on your iOS device: new email, texts, friend requests, and more. With Notification Center, you can keep track of them all in one convenient location. Just swipe down from the top of any screen to enter Notification Center. Choose which notifications you want to see. Even see a stock ticker and the current weather. New notifications appear briefly at the top of your screen, without interrupting what you’re doing. And the Lock screen displays notifications so you can act on them with just a swipe. Notification Center is the best way to stay on top of your life’s breaking news."
Ahhhhh. Awesomesauce.
iTunes Match:"Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality."
Knockout.
Apple and Nintendo should just marry each other. They would have kids as cute as baby pandas, but who hit baseballs like Albert Pujols, and dominate basketball like LeBron James.
I love the fact that Weezer has, probably more than almost any band out there, completely embraced what it means to be a band in 2011. Because every once in a while it leads to something incredibly cool.
Like a perfect cover of Radiohead's "Paranoid Android".
But what about the stuff I bought from Amazon? Ripped from CD?’ Buy it from Amazon? Rip it from CD? No matter. If iTunes sells it you can stream it.
‘But most of what I listen to is not on the iTunes store!’ Then, this service is not for you.
I really, really, really hope that this is how the much-prophesied Apple Streaming Music Locker Magic Box of Bits works. I doubt it will work this way (I have my doubts the music industry would go along with it), but if it did work this way, and all I had to do was upload a list of the music I wanted in my Magic iTunes Music Locker, and it was immediately available, well, that'd be enough for me.
