I love college football. And I love college football blogs. EDSBS is perhaps my favorite blog on the internet. MGoBlog is one of the most professional (and dedicated) blogs I’ve seen on the net (and since I’m a Michigan fan, its sort of my other favorite blog on the internet by default). The social network of college football blogs is strong, yet informal. However, they even have a blogpoll, where members of the network rank their top 25 teams in college football. Here’s last year’s results, catalogued by Wikipedia alongside the “official” polls.
So two thoughts crossed my mind today. First, this really caught my eye today. Hinton, the author of that post is a former freelance blogger who got a job with Yahoo as their CFB blogger extraordinaire (and he is fantastic). For some reason, I assumed that he would stop voting in the blog poll now that he’s a pro-blogger. I guess this is stupid because Spencer Hall/Orson Swindle at EDSBS is a journalist too and even Brian, who runs the BlogPoll and MGoBlog does it for a living.
But then I had another thought: what happens if ESPN’s new conference bloggers want to join the blogpoll? The sports blog world is often been so vociferously against the mainstream media and the World Wide Leader specifically that it might seem counterintuitive. But today the Big Ten Blogger linked to all of the Big 10 blogs that I read; Why is so far off, given the evidence that a blogger for the Sporting News and a blogger for Yahoo are already member, that ESPN’s folks might want to get in on the fun? (This post started when I posed the question to my friend as to how long it’d be til ESPN posted the BlogPoll on their Rankings page.)
I guess in the end I don’t know if it matters. I just think its interesting to watch the interplay between traditional media and blogs, and how they line is constantly getting more blurry. For me, I guess the day that the BlogPoll and the WWL cross will be a remarkable day in the way that sports journalism works.
