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.