The unpredictable nature of user generated content

As a follow up to my last entry I wanted to share an anecdote of working with user generated articles. If you have been watching the Sportingo site you can see that on average we have been publishing around 7 articles a day in December. But since we depend on submissions from our users this average can have big swings. Tuesday was a slow day with only four new articles. Wednesday morning also started slow but by mid day we already had 11 new articles and tow of our editors out for the day. Our editing system is very fluid as it is difficult for us to predict the amount of work required at any given moment as we therefore have a lot of highly qualified editors that come in and out of the system based on the amount of work we have. Usually this works out very well and it the most efficient way to manage a site of our nature. But some days, it can make it very difficult to keep up with your users. The good thing is that more articles mean more traffic to the site, which should then generate more articles and help building the site. As Stuart Little says there is always a silver lining, just sometimes you need to look harder for it (my cultural references are mostly tied to the stories/ videos my boys are watching that week).

Time people of the Year

Time just announced that the person of the year is You, a generic term which stands for all of us that are taking part in a revolution in the world of media. A change from you the editor deciding what is important to US the users saying what we care about. As the CEO of Sportingo I feel that a bit of this selection is also due to the efforts of the scores of writers that have been publishing their opinions on Sportingo. You are shaping a new agenda in the world of sports, talking about subjects ranging from how did cancer effect Lance Armstrong’s performance, to taking a child to watch their first football match. The numbers of people taking part in participatory media is growing and we are very glad to lead the way for so many talented writers in the world of sports. This is also a good opportunity to highlight the results of our first writer competition and an amusing view of why football is the greatest sport of them all.

Long tail and sport

I just read a very interesting presentation from Bear Sterns about the long tail and media. Worth reviewing, in short the presentation is about how the long tail is becoming more important and over time will be a bigger market then the “big media”. It also states that the big opportunity is to aggregate the long tail and organize it in a way that users can find something useful to them.

I agree with most of what this presentation states and wanted to add a view about the long tail and sports. Most sport fans follow more then one sport team or event, we will typically have a big name team that we follow, it can be a football club, basketball, national team or tennis player. At the same time we also have a local favorite or a more obscure sport which we were introduced to and still have an interest in this is the long tail of sport. Growing up in Israel I was a natural football and basketball fan. In a very early age I was introduced to golf by father and took to the game, for years I would spend all summer at Israel’s one and only golf course and would devour any piece of information I could get about the game. My ex roommate from boarding school remains an avid follower of swimming as he continues to support his University football team. As we add more sports on Sportingo we are noticing that fans want to share their thought on more then one sport. A Westham fan might have a lot to say about cricket or rugby and our own Mark Rivlin who is a passionate Leads fan shares his love for the game of chess. The beauty of the web is how easy it is for a person to find a way to express all of their areas of interest and find easy access to more like minded people. Our goal of for Sportingo to enable sport fans to find more ways to express their full range of interests.