Social Giving

As this is the season of giving I have been thinking of ways to get us the social media/ citizen journalism/ bloggers more involved in giving back to the world. I realize this sounds bombastic but I do strongly believe there has to be a way to harness the power of the millions of people who blog to support noble causes. Many bloggers have Adsense or similar type of advertising on their pages. My guess is that 90% of the people that have advertising on their pages are making less then $3 a month (if anyone has that stat please forward it to me) and are participating in social media because they want to, and not in hope of making money from their writing. I am sure that some people don’t ever collect the royalty checks from commission junction, Amazon or Google as the amounts are to small. But what if all of this money could be easily donated to support UNICEF or a similar type of an organization. These small amounts could end up making a big difference. For only a few dollars UNICEF in South Africa get children to play with a real football instead of paper tied up in string. In my recent visit to South Africa I met some of the people from UNICEF and am sure that even small amounts of money could make a big difference for their programs.

I believe that best way to make this work is with the commerce platforms. Google Adsense, Commission Junction and the other technology platforms should add an option in the sign up that will allow us to contribute. As a blogger you could set a limit on how much you are willing to give and then have the technology platform collect all of the money on behalf of millions of people and transfer it directly to the charitable cause.

Anyone participating in this program would get a button that would display as part of their Adsense stating that revenue from this advertising will be contributed.

The technology is fairly simple to implement and the benefits to the community are clear.

If anyone of you knows the right person at Google/ Amazon/ Commission Junction or any of the other major blogging platforms please forward them my post and I promise to keep you updated on the progress of my idea.

Socerex

This is a post I wrote several weeks about after Soccerex and by mistake was not published. It is a bit out of date but still relevant in many ways.

Soccerex is the largest football related conference in the world and brings together football clubs, associations, and all types of business that surround the beautiful game.

The conference was hosted at a suburb of Johannesburg and hospitality was superb. It seems very important for the South African to show what a great host country they will be for the upcoming World Cup and the amount of security around the event was almost ridicules. I doubt they will be able to have this much security with hundreds of thousands of fans visiting from all over the world in two years. My view is that the World Cup in 2010 will be a success. Visitors will enjoy the fascinating and friendly land of South Africa and unfortunately crime will also be part of the games with a fair share of muggings robbery etc. Hopefully no tourist will loose their life. I am looking forward to the World Cup and to many more visits to South Africa.

For Sportingo the show was another opportunity to advance the cause of social media and sport and expand our partnership base for the fast growing guide What’s Online. We have several new partners (more in a separate entry) and the amount of coverage of the media guide is growing each week. We are considering renaming the service, if you have any ideas please leave a comment on email me.

First Tuesday

Tuesday night I was invited to give a short presentation about Sportingo at the First Tuesday event. It was my first time attending a First Tuesday event and I was impressed by the amount of people and interested in still draws 10 years after it started. The subject of the evening was UGC and Jay the VP of Operations from My Space shared some very good insight on the growth of the social media space and My Space view of the world. I particularly liked the way he presented their vision of creating a portal that was based on social interaction. I think that is a very good way of explaining why My Space has been so successful.

All of the ingredients to create My Space have been around for years but it took a lot of hard work and focus to turn it to such a huge success. We can sometimes under estimate how small parts can make a huge difference to the success of a business. The key to succeed with a new venture is truly understanding what the small drivers of success are and then fanatical focus on doing the best job possible in execution. As they say the devil is in the details, the problem is figuring out what is the key functionality that is so important to drive your product success.

Which team should I support

Last week I published an article on Sportingo asking for suggestions on which team I should support. The response to the article was for the most part very positive in particular by Lyton Orient fans that have been very welcoming.

I wanted to quote a couple of my favorite comments which for me symbolize all that is good about supporting a team

The first by MarkR “great ot see the Os fans rallying to the cause...i was new to london a few years back and because i live in clapton (remember clapton orient?!) i took to following the Os. and i can tell you all, it's the best club in the UK, great supporters (i was there at leeds, amazing), great local pride and this season great football.”

And the second by Steve Jenkins

“Sample a game at Brisbane Road and you will be hooked. So many Orient fans started their support of the mighty O's by paying a casual visit - once you have sampled the real guts and thunder of life in League 1 with the Orient you will be with us always! Leyton Orient have such a proud history and are the second oldest professional league club in London and the oldest London Club in the Football League - check out the O's WW1 history on the club's website or just Google and see for yourself. The Leyton Orient Supporters' Club has over 1400 members and will serve you one of your best pints you will ever have!”

With this type of response I will just have to make to an O’s game and see what is like.

Sportel

I am on my way back from Sportel. The show is the largest market for sport rights in the world. Media right holders, TV broadcasters and sport organizations all meet to discuss rights. Around these meetings lots of service provides pitch their offering. Sportingo exhibited at the show for the first time and got a very good response from the market. Our push to create the most comprehensive guide for watching sports online is welcomed by an industry that is very fragmented. If you look at the total number of sport events run every week you will realize that even the largest broadcasters such as ESPN, Eurosport or Sky only show a fraction of all the sport out there. Sportingo’s What’s Online is becoming a central place for fans from around the world to find the sport media they are interested in. We will soon be announcing a number of exciting new partners and before the end of year will be realizing a new version of the site that will both improve our platform and the user experience for fans searching for media. We are also looking at localizing the service into additional languages, any suggestions on what should come first? French, Spanish? German? I would appreciate your comments.

More about London

It has been a month and a half since we relocated to London and I thought I would share some more of my experiences in the city.

It seems that we finally found a place to live, as simple as it sounds finding a place for a family of four is not that simple in this city. With so many neighborhoods to choose from and considerations in finding the right place the search got very complicated. For example I had no idea that we need to register our 3/12 year old to school now or we will not be able to get him into a good school in two years.

Everybody is obsessed with celebrity gossip and sports. The obsession for sport is a good thing for us and I can only appreciate the passion for the game now that I live in London. Once I move into our new home I will write more about this and about the whole process of choosing a team to support.

It seems that the whole media world is centered in London, the access to partners, clients and suppliers it wonderful. In some cases things take longer then I would like the to but that is the nature of working with large media partners.

Everything is so expensive. I am about to sub lease a small office for our London based team ( a basic room with four desks). The price for this room is going to be over 50% more then we pay for a large office that can fit more then 20 people in Israel.

We will be off to Sportel next week. This is the major sport conference of the year in which media right holder, sport federations and media companies all come together. A very intense few days, the only upside is the location in lovely Monte Carlo.

New round of funding

Today we announced a new round of funding from Ingenious Media. Ingenious is a top UK media investor (and have one of the most amazing offices I have ever visited) and will be helping us grow Sportingo and expand our UK presence. We raised a total of $3.2 million which should give us additional marketing resources and help in continue to develop the site. This is the 12 round of funding I have been involved with since starting my first company in the early 90’s. Every round is different and you end up learning a lot from the process and get ideas on how to improve your business. As a new company that is not profitable yet raising money is a very important event since it shows that the market values what you are trying to achieve. We need to remember that it is just one step that gives us more resources to continue and grow the company.

Thanks to all of the team who worked hard on the deal I would especially like to thank our lawyer Efrat that put in a lot of work (and is due to have a baby any day now) to finalize all the documents.

More about how we plan on spending the money and grow the company in my next few posts.

Move to London

I have not updated my blog for a while and wanted to apologize to my devoted readers (all three of you). In late August I relocated to London with my family and am in the process of opening our local office and getting situated in a new city. This major life change has left me with zero free time and as my blog shows. A few impressions about life in London. It is very expensive, I was told to expect that but it is still even more expensive then you expect.

Pubic transportation does not work for a family with young kids. I don’t know what they were thinking about when building the public transport but it is virtually impossible to get around with young kids and a stroller. Fortunately people are very nice and help you carry the stroller up and down stairs.

It is a great city for kids. If you manage to get from one place to the other it is a fan city for kids. Lot’s of things to do, wonderful parks and the never ending entertainment (ta least for my 2 and 3 year olds) of watching the Queen’s guards.

From a company prospective I am having to adjust to managing the team remotely, skype is very useful and my new blackberry makes it possible to go out to meetings and stay in touch (very useful when our nanny called in sick and my wife was out house hunting so I ended up taking the boys to the park).

There are a number of new partnerships that we have been working on that I would love to share and hope that in the next week I can make them all public knowledge.

Wish me luck in our hunt for a new family home in London.

Moving to London

It has been a while since I have updated my blog and I hope that I have not lost my few readers. On Monday I will be moving to open our London office. I wanted to write more about my plans for London and our new office but have had so little time in between the growing demands of the site, some of our soon to be announced partnerships and getting ready to move the family over to London. I will do my best to blog some more about the actual moving experience and live in a new city.

We have reached a new stage in the establishment of Sportingo as equal players in the world of sport media. Sportingo was approved for official press coverage for several prestigious sport events. Through our partnership with FIBA we will be sending a fan on assignment to cover the semi finals and finals of the Americans Basketball Tournament in Las Vegas. For those of you that do not follow basketball this is the tournament which decides which teams qualify to play in the 2008 Olympics. We have launched a contest on Sportingo to determine the best person to cover the event.

For all you rugby fans we are offering a chance to report on the up coming Rugby World Cup in France. I will share some more information about our contest and the experiences of fans that get a chance to be part of the accredited media.

This is a good opportunity to praise the great work by Ed McGrogan who was sent to cover the Fed Cup tie between the US and Russia.

Managing Sport Rights follow up

A BBC reporter that attended the Sport and Technology Conference just published an interesting overview of the growing controversy about online sport rights. If you read all the way to the end of the article you can read some of what I was said at the conference.

Managing Sport Rights

A week ago I was invited to participate as a panelist in the Sport and Technology conference in London. The subject of the panel was protecting rights. There was a great panel and a very lively discussion. I think that we need to change the way we look at rights and start talking about managing your rights instead of protecting them. Right prosecution is only a small part of the equation and right holders that will focus on that aspect alone will find that the market has moved and they stay behind. In an economy that has so much to offer the main problem is gaining share of mind, making sure a fan spends time reading an article on Sportingo and not on any other sport site. The same is the case for any right holder, if you don’t’ make content available to your fans and potential fans they will easily find other ways to fill their time and end up spending more time watching another sport. That does not mean that if you own lucrative rights and have signed TV deals for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars you should just put all of you content out for free. It does mean that you need to be a lot more proactive about learning what your fans are interested in and figuring out a new model that can address this emerging need. Make video clips, highlights or archives available and figure out new ways to prove their value.

Assuming that the life time value of a sport fan is in the many thousands of dollars (if anyone has that number please email me) the focus of right holders should be on how do I use new media to acquire more customers so in the longer term I can be more profitable. The value of gaining another 100,000 fans around the globe that will spend the next 50 years following your sport, watching it, buying merchandize, attending events etc is by far larger then any possible loose of revenue in the short term.

My take from the conference was that most media right holders realize that the world is changing and that they have to experiment with new models and ways to enageage fans.

Buying Caughtoffside

I am very pleased to post about our recent acquisition of Caughtoofside and Chris joining the team and Chief Editor. Caughtoffside were one of Sportingo’s first partners and are a very well respected and successful football blog. Chris who started the blog over a year ago shares our passion for sports and has built a great following of avid fans around the world. Earlier this year Chris quite his day job as an advertising executive to focus on building Caughtoffside. We started our dialog in April and after spending several days together it became clear that we had a lot in common and the way to having Chris join was paved.
Chris will be filling a new position as Chief Editor and will take over responsibly for the content on the site, working with our partners and contributors to improve the quality and depth of Sportingo. For more information you can read Paidcontent’s account of the transaction.

Partnership with FIBA

Last week we started a new basketball section on Sportingo. The new section is a combination of the increased interest in basketball we get from our writers and a new partnership with singed with FIBA (the world governing body for the game). FIBA recently launched a new website with a massive amount of new content and features. As part of the new launch they were looking for a partner that could help them add quality user generated content to their site. FIBA has traditionally used fan reports to provide articles and statistics so partnering with Sportingo was a natural fit.

The partnership with FIBA adds to our existing relationships with the ITF www.daviscup.com the New Zealand Allblacks and is part of our ongoing effort to help leading sport organizations around the world to add quality user content to their sites. This partnerships affirms the growing importance of UGC to traditional media organizations and I believe that we will see this trend continue to grow as highbred models are developed that integrate social media in a better way to traditional media.

Setting new records

Today’s post is a bit of aself promotion. Since launching Sportingo we have seen a steady growth rate, in the first month we got excited about any article that got more then 100 views then the bar went up to 1,000 and soon after 5,000. In April we had several articles that got close to 10,000 views but none managed breaking that barrier. In early May one of most proflic writers midnightjester submitted a two part article about how the Spurs can become one of the big four clubs in England the article did very well and reach about 11,000 views within 2 days. Several days later the article got picked up again and this time went through the 15,000 then the 20,000 mark fell and the article now stand on 23,375. The Midnight Jester who has been writing for us over the past few months and is an avid Spurs fans managed creating a nice following on the site and drove a lot more conversations about his team. Incidentally although the Spurs are a London team our writer is based in South Africa proving that great writing and passion for sports are an international skill.
This article success paved the way for other articles to break the 10,000 market with several other reaching very impressive numbers Luke Durkin’s article about Gareth Bale reaching 12,548, Tom Harness article about Xabi Alonso 11,338 Orion Assante piece about Arsenal’s signing for next season at 11,085 plus a lot of very negative response from Arsenal fans around the web.

The articles and authors I mentioned are all great pieces and deserve the attention they got online. I still can’t predict why one article will do so much better then the others, and for each great article that got read by 10,000 viewers we have 5 other articles that are as good and got read by less then 1,000.

Joost

I have been getting requests from several people for invites to the Joost beta, I am very sorry that I did not respond but I seem to be having some problems with Joost and just can’t seem to be able to access the codes. I promise to send them out once I manage getting them.

A general note about Joost I am less then impressed at this stage, the quality is not as good as I thought it would be and there is not that much to see yet. The people behind Joost are some of the best in the industry so I am sure they will fix it, I guess this is a matter of having setting very high expectations and not delivering on them yet.

Breaking the 10,000 mark

It has been another record breaking week at Sportingo. In April we had several articles that got a lot of attention and flerted with reaching 10,000 views but all seem to have lost steam after the reached 9,000.

On Friday night the mark was finaly broken by The Midnightjester. His article Arsenal and Liverpool at risk of Spurs decide to muscle in on the top has almost 11,000 views to date and seem to have stirred a lot of reaction from football fans.

Our next goal is to have an article reach 10,000 views in one day, and by end of year I am hoping to see the first article reach the 100,000 mark. Anyone willing to bet on the date for that happening, my personal bet is 15 of November 2007

Responsible Commenting

Last week I read about a blogger getting threats to her life by people commenting on her blog. Kathy Sierra who writes at http://headrush.typepad.com/ (a fantastic blog with some great insight into user interaction) received several life-threatening comments along with some ugly sexist insults. I suggest that you visit her blog to read the details. We get hundreds of comments on Sportingo every day and for the most part they are insightful, add value to the debate and present a supporting/opposing opinion or correct facts.

But a small amount seem to cross the line and turn personal and ugly. Sexual or personal insults that have nothing to do with the article or other comments add nothing to the debate.

As a founder of Sportingo, a site which encourages civil conversation among sport fans around the world, I feel it is my responsibly to tackle the issue of inappropriate commenting and take a clear stand about what we want, and most importantly what we do not want to see in comments.

We (that means all of us, blogers, writers readers) want to be treated with respect. We want to be listened to and listen to others, we want to argue, voice our opinion and raise controversy. We want to keep the right to our opinion, and we don't want to be censored, but we do want and expect to be treated with respect and dignity even if people find our opinions disturbing.

I realise that 'free speech' proponents will yell 'fool' and call this post an attempt at censorship. I also realise that the line between keeping a civil discussion and censorship is a very fine one. But sexual insults and life threats have nothing to do with censorship - they are plain wrong. Calling someone a c**t just because she wrote that her football team is going to beat the team you support is plain wrong.

We need to set our own borders, define a set of morals and apply some plain common sense, and then go out and state our opinions, get a conversation going about what we as a global society of bloggers/ writers/ net citizens feel is the make-up of a responsible conversation. But most important let's make it clear that we will not accept members of our community abusing our fellow citizens. And we will stand up and use our keypads to state our disgust.

To encourage this dialogue I set up a site http://www.responsiblecommenting.com/ My friend and very talented designer Udi Bobrovsky designed a button which I urge you to put on your blog, forum or website which shows your support for this issue. Please visit the new site and give me your suggestions on what else we can do to support this initiative and improve our community.

Joost beta

I finally got the chance to download and test the new Joost client. Overall I was a bit disappointed. I don’t think the interface is that intuitive and was having a hard time figuring out how I can go back or stop the video from running. Coming from the world of sports I was looking for what sport content was available and could not find much. Even what I found would not play through and seemed to be jerky. It could be due to the fact that I was connected at the office and the network was busy, but I was expecting more from the people that created Skype. Perhaps the quality will get better once more people sign up.

The good news is that within a year watching TV on the Internet will be as common place as using the Internet for international calling. I believe that Joost will fix some of the initial problems get a lot more content and tens of millions of users. I will keep you posted on my future experiences using Joost.

Red Herring and General updates

I have not published on my blog for some time as I find myself extremely busy with work and life. A quick update regarding the past few weeks. I attended the Red Herring Venture conference in Cannes two weeks ago. The conference took place at the Internconntinental hotel which is one of the prim hotels in Cannes. A very interesting event which exposed me to several very interesting European companies and investors. My insight is that Europe is still far behind the US or Israel in terms of the opportunities for an early stage technology/ new media company. It seems that the culture and infrastructure do not support the level of commitment and risk taking that is needed for a successful entrepreneur culture to evolve.

We are getting very good feedback about our partnerships with leading sport organizations such as the allbalcks. Are partnerships allow sport organizations to add quality user generated content from Sportingo writers to their site as fan driven news. The articles that are published on these sites seem to get a lot of attention and we will be announcing several more partnerships in the very near future.

Our team continues to grow and we have several open positions. I am interviewing for an online marketing manager and looking for a web developer to join our team.

Our online media guide is about to launch which has been keeping us extremely busy in the past few weeks, I will post some more information once we launch.

Sportingo makes short list in the market competition

Several weeks ago we entered a competition hosted by Themarker magazine and Microsoft for the most promising Israeli Start Up in 2007. This is a fairly prestigious competition and I was very pleased that Sportingo was selected as one of the top three companies (the article is in Hebrew). We now get a chance to present the company on Sunday infort of a crowd of over 1,000 people and a panel of judges. Yesterday when it was announced that we made the short list I got to talk to one of the judges and asked him what sport he follows. He said that he is not a big sport fan, but when he goes to work all his partners just keep talking and analyzing the latest games, so he figured that giving them a platform to write and discuss their love for sport must be a good idea.

We could not have said this any better ourselves and the hundreds of contributors to Sportingo, thousands of people commenting and hundreds of thousands visiting the site also agree with this statement. I better get back to work as I need to prepare a captivating presentation for next Sunday. If you have any ideas on what should my best 5 minute pitch include please don’t be shy in sharing your thoughts.

Cricket World Cup

Let me start with a confusion I am not a cricket fan and know very little about the game. Four months ago if you would have told me the Ashes were about to take place I would have given you a blank look. I am still far from an expert of the sport and have not had the privilege to see a live match at Lord’s but I am beginning to get a better idea of what makes this game so special. This is mostly due to the fantastic contributions we have been getting from our growing number of cricket writers. With the World Cup starting in a week we are offering an alternative for avid cricket fans to get coverage of the matches. We now have fan writers covering all the contending teams and expect to have some great stories coming in following each match. Will Australia get back to form and dominate the game, is Sri Lanka the big surprise for the tournament, or perhaps South African can overcome its history to win the Cup. I do hope you come to Sportingo to read comment and write your views about this great tournament.

New version of the site

The new version of the site is finally up and running. We started this project with some minor changes to the site based on feedback from our readers and ended up with a full redesign of the site and some great new functionality. The beauty of the web is the instant feedback we get to the site, and our ability to continue and make changes in very rapid development cycles. As CEO one of my big challenges is deciding how much we should follow our instincts compared to going through the rigiours process of market research. I expect that companies such as Google, Yahoo etc go through a lot of research for any change on their site. As a young company we relay on feedback from our audience and integrate it into a vision for the site and what we think our users would like to see.

Our next big release is due early April when we launch our media guide (I will write more about it and the changing face of sport broadcasting over the Internet).

I hope you like the new design and would appreciate feedback on the site.

Citizen journalism, sport and the future of human life

I was invited to an event hosted by scoop the Israeli citizen journalism site. The event marks the one year anniversary of the site and brought together about 100 of their writers and several speakers to discuss the phenomenon of citizen journalism the achievements of the site and its future.

A have several observations from the event, first is that people do have the power to effect change. You don’t need to go through a long investigative process to do good in this world. It is enough to shed light on a small problem and get it fixed to create a better society for all of as. This is the true power of people on the internet. We don’t need to try and solve world hunger or create a utopian society just use this media to constantly make small improvements in peoples life’s. Highlight the good and criticize the bad, encourage a public debate and make people/ companies/ and the public sector accountable for their actions.

This reminds me of the opening ceremony to the Atlanta Olympic Games. I was fortunate enough to have an amazing seat on the 8 row (just behind Demy Moore and Bruce Willis, I will elaborate on that experience in a separate post) and got a very close view of the way the very elaborate show was conducted. The whole process was broken down into very simple tasks which many volunteer dancers and children could follow. But put tougher the effect was magnificent. I view citizen journalism in a similar way make it simple for many people to take one small step and together create a magnificent show that remains in peoples minds for many years to follow.

Another observation from Scoop’s event was the power of the comments. Time and time again the writers talked about the importance of the comments to their articles and how personally they take the negative feedback. As Sportingo deals with the very emotional world of sport some of the comments get to be very negative, I hope that our contributors are not deterred by these type of comments. My favorite example is the articles by Orion Assante, he seems to get a very strong reaction from fans who end up accusing him of being a supporter of there opposing team. I do not know which team Orion supports but based on the comments on the site he has to be supporting Manchester United, Everton, Chelsea and possibly Manchester City a very unlikely situation.

More stats

Sportingo is growing and on the 16 of January we hit a milestone, the first time we had over 10,000 visitors on the site in one day. To be exact we had 11,663 visitors on the site on that day. We have been flirting with the 10,000 figure since early in January and it felt good for the moment to break it (our next goal 100,000 a day). Measuring traffic can get to be addictive. I got emails from some of our authors that go back to check the stats on their article every 10 minutes. It is very satisfying to see people responding you’re an article you wrote and knowing that someone out there took the time to read it. I wish I could meet with every one of the people that visited the site on that day, unfortunately I could not even manage reading all the articles that we published that day. Turning a general number into a specific person is what makes the social web so unique. In the past week I have emailed with a new contributor from Australia, a Shaun who is working on their Phd on English history from Oxford, a Mathematics Phd candidate from the US and an Indian Engineering Phd candidate (I guess we are attracting a smart crowd). I will try featuring some of the more interesting people that I get to meet through Sportingo in future posts.

Site Stats and long tail

I have been analyzing the data about the sites first four months of operation and wanted to share some of my insight (by the way if there is anyone reading this blog that is expert on Google Analytics I could use some help).
Our traffic is growing considerable and we are reaching thousands of readers each day. We are running an internal bet on when the site will hit 500,000 visits a month with my bet on April 26 2007.
An interesting phenomenon I have noticed that about a third of my daily traffic is directed toward older articles. The extreme example is an article about Rugby published on Nov 26 2006 that continues to get comments about it almost six weeks after it was published (it is up to 90 comments). I guess this is an example of our own long tail. The more quality content you create and get indexed on the web the more people will come to visit the site. With our current growth rate and the amount of great new content being published on the site I expect these numbers to grow considerably over the next few months. I wonder how much of the traffic for traditional sport site is directed to their archive compared to the day to day news.
Our traffic remains predominately European with over 40% coming from the UK around 20% from North America other important markets are Australia, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Ireland, Norway and Israel.
Cricket was our most popular category in December with a lot of coverage focused on the Ashes. While Tennis had the highest number of readers per article.

We continue to see a serge in the number of people signing up to write on Sportingo and overall the quality of articles is excellent. I will try getting some data about the writers for my next update.

New Year New Media and New Trends?

The web is full of end of year summarizes and predictions for 2007. Time’s selection of You as the person of the year has been covered extensively as the idea of user generated content seems to have taken over day to day conversations (do conversations about UGC also count as UGC?) .

Is UGC over hyped? What can we expect for 2007?

I think that the term might have been over hyped recently but not the reality behind it. People connect with other people, we spend most of our life talking with other people, arguing, and sharing our opinions with the people we know. This has been true from the beginning of time. Technology has enables our circle of friends to grow and created better opportunities for us to reach out and find some other person that has an opinion we care to hear or share our own opinion with more people then we could ever imagine.

I believe that when people write a blog they don’t think of a number of people that will read it but rather about how they would present the point in a discussion with a friend, or possibly a stranger they strike up a conversation on a plan on train ride. That is what makes UGC so interesting for the majority of us, we feel the human contact. It is not a crafted message created by a spokesperson, PR maverick or bureaucrat but rather represents the most basic way of communication we all feel so comfortable with.

With more and more of the media becoming alienated we have an inherent desire for the simple conversation that UGC can offer. A feeling that we can get to know the writer, they are just another person and not the mouth piece of some unknown media organization. This is a simple truth that is part of our human experience and will continue to grow the amount and popularity of UGC.

At Sportingo we are offering a platform to deal with one aspect of UGC which is fans passion for sports. The amount of articles on our site continues to grow at a brisk pace and we are already working on next versions of the site that will include more media and even better ways for fans and writers to share their thoughts.

The notion that if you build it they will come is proving itself as more and more people find their way to Sportingo and many other UGC sites share their thoughts with a growing global audience.