- Add Sports Illustrated to the list of long-time print media staples who are making their entire printed catalog available on the internets for all to enjoy. As of tomorrow, SI's 53-year history of sports writing and photography will be accessible -- for free -- to visitors of their website. In addition to simply expanding their online offerings, which will subsequently drive more eyes to SI.com and allow the company -- a subsidiary of Time Warner -- to charge more for advertising, the additional content will help SI flood web portal (e.g. Google) search results with their own content.
"The real hidden value of this is what it does for search," said John Squires, executive vice president of Time Inc., the Time Warner subsidiary that publishes Sports Illustrated. The move quadruples the site's volume, he said. "We'll have to work our way up the search algorithms over time, but eventually, someone searches Johnny Unitas, and SI.com is going to pop up."
In September, the New York Times unlocked the doors to their online archives, an area that was previously reserved for subscribers of their printed product (or online subscribers). Newsweek has likewise made their archives -- currently dating back to 1990 -- available to the public gratis, and they will be expanding the archive in the coming months to cover every issue of the magazine dating back to its 1933 inception.One would imagine that other print media stalwarts will fall in line over the next few years as they embrace the power of information accessibility as a tool for building an online presence, and as their printed products become increasingly irrelevant in the face of web content that constantly being updated in real time.
- Need some Tuesday reading? Check out this brilliant feature on Lenny Dykstra in The New Yorker. The article clocks in at almost 5,500 words, but it's a fantastic read. Dykstra has transformed himself from a dumb jock to entrepreneur (he owned a lucrative chain of car washes) to a fantastically successful day trader, and is now pioneering a new magazine, called The Players Club, targeting other dumb jocks so as to encourage them to invest their money wisely so they have what to live on when their playing days wind down.
How well is Nails doing? Well, he bought Wayne Gretzky's house last year for $18.5 million. Click the link for pictures; the place is ungodly.
- Fancy yourself a baller? Marc Normandin reviews MLB 08: The Show for PS3 over at MetsGeek today.
- Fantasy baseball tip: got too many leagues to keep track of? Try mixing it up a bit. This year, instead of doing a standard (or modified) 5x5 roto league at my office, we decided to just do a homerun derby, which is surprisingly easy to setup using Yahoo's fantasy baseball leagues. Here are the settings we used:
- Five utility hitters
- Five bench spots
- No DL spots
- No pitchers
- One stat category: homerunsIf you're anything like me, you end up joining more leagues than you care to keep updated, and by June or July it's a miracle if you are regularly updating half of them. The homerun derby is a nice twist because there is very little maintenance and the draft is easy and fast. There's no need to pay attention to positional strengths or concerning yourself if a closer run is about to kick off, leaving you out in the cold because you just grabbed your two picks at one end of the serpentine.
- Finally, if you just can't get enough of me here, I'll be participating in a blogger roundtable chat at The Happy Recap tonight (Tuesday) at 8pm. You have to sign up for an account in order to participate, which I assume means read or comment. You can get into the chat by clicking on the "Live Chat" button beneath David Wright's likeness in the top banner. See you there!
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