On FanHouse and their Fantasy Sports Girl collaboration

July 29th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanR

Setting aside the fact that John Ness and Miss G both left their FanHouse producer roles within a matter of weeks — and really, this is something that should not be set aside in this discussion, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll leave that be — this whole Fantasy Sports Girl spot on FanHouse is just awful.

I understand that sex sells. I understand more page views equals more money. It’s a business; I get it. I understand you have to do this kind of thing as a corporate entity to generate some revenue. But sweet Jesus: there’s a better way to display tits on your site than this. This is tasteless, it’s banal, it’s embarrassing. It’s target audience seems to be below the lowest common denominator.

Try Ufford’s Attractive Olympian bit. He plays around with it and self-mocks, knowing it’s for the AOL Welcome Screen and its ease of page views. And at least there’s some intelligence to it. This Fantasy Sports Girl bit is just bad. Really, really bad.

FanHouse was built by Jamie Mottram as an intelligent, all-encompassing sports blog. Sure it may be vanilla at times, but that’s because it’s housed by AOL — not a place where you can drop f-bombs at will. I respect Tom Ziller, Will Brinson, Pat Lackey, Matt Watson and all the other bloggers that have built the brand that everyone has come to know there. Hell, me and E were and are a part of that as well.

Everyone’s high-quality work doesn’t deserve to be displayed next to this tripe. Yeesh.

See also: Mr. I | The Sporting Blog

Update: Tom Fornelli is a GOLDEN GOD. Also, because I wrote this in about 10 minutes before lunch, I forgot to mention E is also no stranger to the AOL page view shilling.

China’s Internetz r broken

July 28th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Stroll with me down memory lane, won’t you? 10 years ago. 1998. Jay-Z was riding high off the commercial success of Hard Knock Life, which wasn’t nearly as good as Reasonable Doubt but had some bangers, too. Bill Clinton was getting his knob-slob schedule openly dissected in the halls of Congress. Matt Drudge was still considered cool. You remember.

Every time you wanted to use the internet, you had to plea with your parents to get off the phone, Mom, I’m supposed to chat with my friends about our “homework” assignment, and I can’t while you’re talking to Grandma and you said you wanted us to have the internet for educational purposes so LET ME USE IT MOM. Ah, memories.

China’s Olympic peeps remember those days — in China, that was actually just last week (ht: SbB):

Slow connection speed and apparent restricted access to news websites have riled many of the media outlets already in Beijing 12 days out from the opening ceremony. The Chinese ruling party is widely known to monitor and limit all internet access within China. However, two years ago BOCOG media services head Li Jingbo promised in the official China Daily newspaper that there would be uncensored access during the Games, which begin on August 8.

Japanese reporters said click-through connections would not work. Connections drop out frequently and several organisations, including the Australian Olympic Committee, say the speed is up to 10 times slower than in Australia. One picture takes at least two minutes to send.

On one hand, this is surprising, because not only is China trying to use the 2008 Olympics to prove its status as one of the world’s great countries, its overall broadband speed is gaining ground on the fastest countries in the world. (The U.S., as it stands, is good, but not Japan-or-Sweden great.)

Then again, a lack of internet access would be a pretty handy way to keep opinions on China, and the games, as quiet as possible. It’s pretty hard to send back photos of Democratic protesters when those photos take 56K-style speeds to get there. And porn? Forget about it. What good is the internet without porn?