Sidearm Delivery is doing fine work keeping us up to date with the early days of the Hartford (don’t give us any shit/you’re gonna get hit) Wolfpack’s 2006-07 campaign, but more importantly, he’s digging up some of the scariest jerseys ever seen.
Paul Kulka of Kulka’s Korner has been doing the blogeroony thing recently at NHL.com, and last week, urged his fellow hockey fans to bug the shit out of their fair weather friends who apparently have something better to do with their lives than watch the NHL.
NHL.com receives millions of hits per day — imagine the impact we can have if each and every one of you called five of your closest non-fans! The ratings for the NHL games this week would be an unexpected surprise and we would cause panic in the lives of those who measure the TV ratings.
Canucks’ Corner’s Tom Benjamin considers this to be just a little crass.
It is also fair ball to ridicule Paul for it just like it is fair ball to ridicule Al Strachan, Tom Benjamin or anyone else who advances a ridiculous idea. (And this idea was ridiculous. Hockey fans won’t do it and if they did they won’t meet with any success.) While this may have been both a clumsy and laughable effort, it does highlight a disturbing trend. Newsweek puts a spotlight on the hockey blogosphere and ends up damning it with very faint praise:
“Our demographic is younger, and that’s what they want,” says Doug Perlman, the NHL’s head of new media. “We went as viral as possible during our relaunch.”
“Viral,” of course, is another word for “cheap,” and the struggling league is grateful for any attention it can get.
Viral is also another word for fake.
The St. Louis Blues “fan” site. Eklund. Message board Trolls. The Kukla appointment, the Kukla post and Kukla’s Korner. Ted Leonsis. Media bloggers and corporate bloggers. A blogosphere infected? Is the citizen being squeezed out of the citizen’s media?
I’d love to tackle that question, but I’m too entraced by the latest entry by Cliff Floyd at MLBlogs.