EMFMV: Your site for clean Cal Sports discussions
(Written by kencraw)
There are a million fun “take this survey” sites that do some analysis or another in a very unscientific fashion. You can add to that list a new one, the “Blog and Website Cuss-O-Meter”:
As a point of comparision, here are the other Cal blogs I visit on occasion:
- California Golden Blogs: 6.2%
- Bear Necessity: 5.1%
- Cal Football Fan: 0.7%
- Oski Talk: 6.4%
- Rose Bowl Before I Die: 6.9%
- California Golden Bear Football: 1.0%
- BearTalk (with Jonathan Okanes): 6.3%
- College Hotline with Jon Wilner: 4.5%
- Sturdy Golden Bear: 8.2%
- Cal Bear Wire: n/a
- Bears With Fangs: n/a
- My Bear Territory: n/a
If you put in a bogus or very slow URI, it’ll give a 0% answer. So the n/a’s are ones I couldn’t get an answer back from as the sites were clearly responding slowly both to my own browser and to the Cuss-O-Meter. Noteworty however is Cal Football Fan, the one site that creates it’s own content that scored lower than me. Surprising was the high pecentage for Sturdy Golden Bear, who generally seemed to run a clean site at their now-defunct page (or at least it seems that way).
For what it is worth, as I said, the above list is all of the sites I frequent on occasion. That means it’s the sites from which I pick who goes on the blogroll. This summer I’ll be re-doing the blogroll and will be including new sites that have proven themselves to be worthy of being on my blogroll. For those who don’t know, I take which blogs I link to very seriously. There are those sites out there that’ll post a link to just about any blog they know of, and while that is a fine way to go about it, it has the downside of the list getting so long it is meaningless and hard to find the good needles in the haystack.
Here are the criteria I use:
- Moral content: The #1 thing to prevent your blog from inclusion on the list is any content that is morally offensive. The most common example of this is frequent swearing. Does it really add anything to a post to say a player is f-ing pathetic? Find better words to describe yourself. Other examples include any suggestions of violence against anyone, this is college football not a war, or personal attacks against players or coaches beyond just their capabilities on the football field. It’s OK to say that Joe “Booya†Ayoob is the worst player to ever grace the Cal sideline and Tedford is a complete coaching moron to have let him stay behind center for as long as he did (even though I’d disagree), but to say you want to rip out his bowels and force-feed it to Tedford crosses the line. Finally, I expect the comment sections being in line with my moral standards and that the comments of the blog’s author on other blogs meet the standards as well (one blogger in particular suffers from this problem). For the comment sections, I don’t expect one to moderate to the degree that all comments meet my moral standards, but that truly, wildly objectional comments are deleted and somewhat to moderately objectionable content is somehow rebutted/chastized.
- Frequency of posting: I’m only going to link to blogs with somewhat regular posting. Generally that means at least a couple posts a week during the season. I’m not too concerned with off-season posting but someone who is consistent all the time gets extra props.
- Quality of posts: What this means depends on what your blog is trying to accomplish. If you’re just trying to report news, I’m not going to hold it against you that you don’t have detailed analysis. At the same time, if your goal is news and you’re always a week behind everyone else, well, that’s not very good news. On the other hand, if you’re a game-analyst type guy, I’m not going to hold slower posting against you, but I do expect that your analysis is meaningful. Generally what this means is if when I go to your blog, do I find something worth reading?
- Longevity: I generally like to see that a blog has been around for atleast a year before it gets the nod. This is partially to give me time to judge based on the above criteria and also because lots of bloggers drop off within a month or two of blogging.
If you don’t care if you get a link on this blog, that’s fine. But if you do, those are the criteria I judge by. If your blog is not in the above list, consider this post a good place to comment and put your blog’s URL so that I can see if it is one I want to include in the fall.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I’m really interested in knowing what that Cuss-O-Meter considers cussing. Does “darn” or “crap” count?
April 25th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s just for “fun” and that nothing meaningful can be taken from the results. There’s just too many questions and no answers: What words count? Do they only look at the main page? If they dig into the pages, how deep do they dig? Do they ensure they don’t follow links onto other pages? Is every word the same value in upping your percentage?
In any case, I was just posting it for fun. For what it is worth, my personal blog got a 0.4%, so whatever it’s using to judge, my thoughts on the Catholic faith are apparently cleaner than my football thoughts.
However, I fully expect Twist to put up a couple posts to put CGB over the top. I mean, you guys only have two sites to out-do to get the coveted biggest cusser award. 🙂 (Which in the old days would go to TBIOOTF without question.)
April 25th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Honestly, they must be reaching for some of those words…I would have thought your blog would have gotten a 0.0%!
I see your point regarding cussing, especially in regards to other people, and most of the time, swearing is a lazy way of expressing yourself. Still, there are times (the end of the Oregon State game, for example), where a twenty-minute tirade of F-bombs seems like the most appropriate and cathartic response. But then, I don’t have kids ;).
April 25th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Rag, when you have kids, your cathartic needs take on a more epileptic instead of verbal form.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Whoa, the site’s being updated again!
Nice to see you back sir.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Thanks Avinash. We’ve been back up for the entire spring practice. As I promised when I went on my fast, I was back up and running the week after Easter.
Make sure you checkout the podcasts. Lots of good spring practice stuff there.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
nowwwwwwwwwww I get it. That’s a really tight way to look at things. On or off the blogroll, I admire that.
April 25th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I don’t see what the huge deal is with swearing. Lighten up.
April 26th, 2008 at 6:18 am
McGee, it’s not a HUGE deal, particularly to me personally. But there are those who either find it offensive personally or don’t want their children seeing/hearing it. I want those type of people to feel comfortable and welcome here.
That said, in retrospect, the post looks worse than I intended because of a coincidence. The Cuss-O-Meter was just a joke. I don’t take anything that says with any seriousness. You’ll notice that a number of the blogs on my blogroll don’t score very well on the Cuss-O-Meter and none of them will be leaving the blogroll for next season because of it.
When I “double-tasked” the post to also explain about my blogroll, something I’ve written before in past years, I suspect it looked worse to some than I intended. The 2nd half is a nearly direct cut-and-paste from my old blog (the tip-off is the example used is Ayoob not Longshore). Since I was cut-and-pasting, I didn’t really think about the fact that the #1 item on my criteria could be construed to mean that I took the Cuss-O-Meter seriously.
That was not intentional.
So to be clear: There’s not an active Cal blog out there right now that I’m aware of that isn’t or won’t be included for moral content reasons. This wasn’t the case a couple years ago. There were 3 or 4 sites that dropped F-bombs left and right and also had numerous personal attacks on players and coaches. Luckily they’ve all either cleaned up their act or gone out of business. So when I wrote the criteria, it was important that I emphasized that factor.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:33 am
I prefer to limit my Cal football related cursing to when I am watching the game alone in the “man”/Cal room of my house…which is rare. If my wife and I do not travel to more than half of the games (no cursing at the games since it is a family environment). The other half of the games she watches with me in the “man”/Cal room. The only solo time last year was the second half of the UCLA game. So I did have a 76 yard long rant with 1:33 left in the game. Go Bears!
April 26th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Okanes with a 6.3%? Such a filthy mouth. Playing.
But interesting nonetheless. But the issue of moral content was something that I had to consider in starting my site. On one hand, there were a lot of obvious jokes that could be made using questionable content or could have been funnier with swearing, but on the other end, I still wanted it to be something I was okay with showing to my youth group kids.
I’m hoping to manage that balance moving forward. And good to see another post back up!
April 28th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I attribute the low rating to the lack of commenting by me of late… bleep bleep bleepity bleep