Well, we made it to the Best Pittsburgh Sports Blog Championship! If you had to guess who would make the finals before the tournament started, I think you would predict The Pens Blog and Mondesi's House. These blogs are likely the most read and most influential of all the Pittsburgh sports blogs. Both The Pens Blog and Mondesi's House are regularly linked to by national and international sports blogs and certainly earned their places in the finals based on the outstanding posts and information they provide and have provided over the years.
The Pens Blog reached the finals on the strength of a 66.8%-33.2% victory over Behind the Steel Curtain. BSC dominated its division but ran into a seemingly unstoappable force. In the other semi-final, Mondesi's House and Pittsburgh Sports and Mini Ponies were close over the first day of voting, but Mondesi's House pulled away with a huge Tuesday afternoon winning 56.6% to 43.4%. Congratulations to both Behind the Steel Curtain and PSAMP for reaching the Final Four and for the amazing job they do on their blogs.
It's now your turn to select the Best Pittsburgh Sports Blog. Voting starts now and runs until Friday, March 6 at 5:00pm. As a reminder, please only vote once. Let the best blog win!
#1 The Pens Blog vs. #1 Mondesi’s House
Thanks again to all of the incredible blogs in the tournament, Cotter for creating the super logo and to you for visiting and voting! In addition, please check out all of the blogs in the tournament and other Pittsburgh sports blogs listed in the links section on the right.
Update: Voting is now closed. A recap of the tournament will be posted on this site in the next few days. Thanks to everyone for visiting and voting!
Posts
17 comments:
I love both blogs... but mondesishouse is getting jobbed here... theyre the one that covers all pittsburgh sports not just the pens, and just because some puckbunnies can click a mouse doesn't really mean that thepensblog is better... i love both sites though, im just disappointed in the voters
Yeah, but Mondesi's House is a jerk who steals from other sites. Do you want original content to win or that.
Case in point right here
No need for arguing or name-calling. We're trying to run a clean campaign here!
While the percentages currently show that The Pens Blog has a huge lead, the number of votes cast so far are far fewer than those in the past two rounds. There is still plenty of time to vote, and the championship is far from decided.
The voting is as it should be. Breaking it down looks like...
Influence over fan base: TPB
Creativity: TPB
Canned one line jokes: Mondesi
Discussing "pop culture" topics as only a creepy, out of touch 40-something could: Mondesi
Self-congratulatory posts: Mondesi
Oh, whoops, my bad. Mondesi wins.
Right on Jay. Right on.
Shit, I'd hate to hear what you guys think of OFTOT.
Also, to the anonymous commenter - that's absolutely no reason for one blog to deserve anyone's vote more than another.
And to be honest, if logic would suggest that anyone's getting jobbed here, it would be the blogs that only focus on one team since they only have one fanbase to pull readership from...believe it or not, there are actually some Pittsburghers who don't like either the Steelers or the Pens or the Pirates for whatever reason.
Just sayin'
Not to mention, there is no such thing as a "Best Pittsburgh Sports Blog." And I don't mean that as a dig on the competition. Sean has done a fantastic job and it's been really interesting to watch the results roll in. But everyone likes different things. So "Best" is a subjective judgment.
Besides, we all write blogs. Let's not take this too seriously.
All I can say is that there must be a LOT of jealous people out there over the enormous popularity of Mondesi's House.
What are you people talking about? He attributes EVERY link I've ever seen! He never steals anything either as that one goof suggested. As far as patting himself on the back, I don't get that either.
Mondesi didn't even campaign to win this contest such as the way Mini Ponies or even Pens blog and even Sean did!
The guy just goes out every day and writes a great blog. What's wrong with you people, are you paying too much for your free entertainment? What morons.
All I can say is there's a LOT of ignorant anonymous commenters out there.
You look at it as "campaigning" when those of us that write see it as providing support to our buddy Sean and the effort he put into this thing.
Don't get too full of yourself. You're looking at it from a very slanted angle.
God.
Both blogs do very different things.
Mondesi's House is more mainstream (and he's not even close to 40 BTW)).
Pensblog appeals to people in a youthfull, rebellious kind of way, which brings out strong support in the poll.
I read both, I like both, and as the guys on Pensblog would say, if you're jobbing either of these two great blogs right now, you're a joke.
People were just expressing a differing opinion, is all. You can't expect everyone to like everything. I'd rather someone speak the truth instead of just blending in.
For the life of me, I can not figure out the popularity of The Pens Blog. The writing on the site is juvenile at best, when it exists at all. It's mostly a lot of centered-text childish one-liners and grade-school photo-editing jobs. There's nothing that approaches cogent analysis or personality beyond drunk community college kid sitting next to you the arena trying way too hard to be funny.
The depth of the comments ("First!" "Free Candy!") on the TPB should tell you all you need to know about the intelligence of the people who find the site worthwhile.
There's nothing that approaches cogent analysis or personality beyond drunk community college kid sitting next to you the arena trying way too hard to be funny.
Since when is blogging supposed to follow a set pattern? If you want cogent analysis, there's hundreds of places you can go on the Internet. If you want young guys making a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the cogent analysts, you go to Pensblog. Blogs should reflect their authors' personalities.
But leave the "community college," canned-blogger-insults at the door, man. It's really condescending. Commenting on one blog about some other blog's content while not even taking the time to come up with a fake name is rather insulting.
Fair enough on the cogent analysis part. They never claim to bring that to the table, so I shouldn't have made it sound like I was trashing them for not having any.
What they claim to be or aim to be is funny...and they're just not. I stand by my statement that they're level of comedy is juvenile, simplistic and downright homophobic at times. My point with "community college" wasn't to bash the bloggers' level of education, but rather to point out that they often sound like a group of underage drunks sitting next to you at the arena. They're not funny in that context; in fact, they usually ruin the game.
Why does that schtick fly on the web?
Because if you're not a member of the sportsblogging community, its kinda hard to understand why we write with the individual voices that we do. I'm a pretty smart guy, but I put extra effort into every post to make it sound like a complete idiot wrote it.
Sportsblogging blew up because we were tired of the same old boys club of sportwriters out there. 99% of that community are old white guys who are kinda out of touch with the newer generation of sports fans. The level of snark and glibness in the sports blogosphere exists because we refuse to take ourselves too seriously, which is something that can't be said for the stressed old guy in the locker room trying to secure a usable quote from a less-than-thrilled athlete before his column's deadline.
Check out the voting numbers in this entire tourney. We represented pretty well, which means we're connecting with our fans. Who did Smizik, or who does Collier reflect with nowadays? I started my site because I saw what Mondesi was doing, and I respected everything put out by Pensblog, WHYGAVS, and some of the other local sports blogs that started before or at the same time a mine.
Thanks for at least using a fake name this time, though!
Tecmo, I don't disagree with anything you just said.
I love sports blogs, and I think the best sports writing today is being done today on the web, by people without journalism degrees or press passes. I think Mondesi's House adds a lot to the local sports discussion, as does WHYGAVS, Empty Netters, Pitt Blather, etc.
You keep misreading my comments as being the usual cranky criticism of blogs in general, when nothing could be further from the truth. My point all along has been that there are so many local sports blogs out there that do their thing so much better than TPB. In turn, its popularity kind of blows my mind.
As an analogy,just because I think Bob Smizik sucked as a newspaper columnist doesn't mean I hate every traditional sports columnist either.
I think Pensblog is so popular because it came out before 99% of the Pgh sports blogs that are out there, and did so in a voice that hadn't been heard in the city. Mondesi is a freelance writer, and you can hear it in the even tone of his voice. Good blogs spring up all the time now, but so do bad ones. The good ones will be recognized eventually on some level. I respect Mondesi, but find his style to be somewhat on the boring side. Sure, there's plenty of newer all-pgh blogs with unreal content, but they won't receive the praise they deserve because of name-recognition with Mondesi. Same with Pensblog. They made a name for themselves in a very specific niche, and continue to put out content. They appeal to an audience that was hungering for what they had to say at that time. You may find the content juvenile, but you're in the lower percentages. I'll go to a Penguins bar here in Manhattan and there's groups of Penguins fans talking about what was just on Pensblog. Steigy and Errey use Pensblog references on air.
They bought low and cashed in when the market was right. I think they deserved to win because they bring color to a medium that routinely falls into the bland by bloggers who think they're better than they actually are.
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