I also completed my Wisdom of Crowds Red Sox 2008 player projections.  The results and my thoughts can be found on MVN as well.

Outside of work, I’ve been spending a significant amount of time helping out at MVN (http://www.mvn.com). Not only have I been writing about the Red Sox at Fire Brand of the American League, MVN’s Red Sox coverage, but I have also been reading every post that comes through the MLB section of MVN and editing the MLB front door on a daily basis.

Every morning I read through the 25 or so posts that were made since I last updated the door and choose the best five or six posts.  From there, I look for Creative Commons ok photos that match those stories at Flickr or through MVN’s subscription at ICON SMI (http://www.iconsmi.com).  After resizing the image and writing the headline, lead, and teaser for the featured article, I choose two more stories to run in the subhighlight section.

I’ve really enjoyed this process as it gives me the opportunity to read some great baseball writing as well as hone my craft as a writer by forcing me to look for great writing and discern the good from the great.  It also keeps me up to speed with all things baseball.  I wish I had time to read and be active with every baseball blog out there (at least the top three to five for each team.  I really like the concept of the editorial layer on top of a blog network.

I have also enjoyed my own writing at MVN’s Red Sox coverage (http://www.mvn.com/mlb-redsox).  While I absolutely miss writing this all for myself at the Red Sox Times (http://www.redsoxtimes.com), I couldn’t keep up with the comprehensive level of coverage I expected out of myself.  Between game threads, recaps, analysis, breaking news, etc.  I couldn’t be everywhere at once.

I do still hold a dream of turning the Red Sox Times into an editorially managed “best of Red Sox blogs” print and online publication.  But I really haven’t had the time to pull it all together.

I also have a new project, a Red Sox podcast.  My first episode is live at MVN and can also be listened to here:

or at Red Sox Radio (currently at http://redsoxradio.wordpress.com until I get things set up at http://www.redsoxradio.net which I recently purchased).

Podcasting is a thrill.  It really is a craft that I think I can master and I look forward to the challenge.  As my cohost Paul said at the end of our first episode quoting Craig Kilborn’s wise words at the end of the first airing of the Daily Show, “we’ll get better.”

I’ll certainly try and update here more often (when I am not screwing around with tumblr, friendfeed and all the other ways that I can communicate with the Interwebs).

I don’t really think I need to add anything to this, but wanted to post it somewhere personal so that I’d always have a way back to it’s words.  Thank you Randy and God Bless.

Editor’s Note: The following article will appear in the March Issue of Roster Magazine as well as MVN’s Basketball U column.

Connecticut Huskies
21-5 (10-3 Big East)
RPI: #11
Projected Seed: #2-4

Seed Explanation
Sitting at 11-5 and 2-3 in the Big East on January 17th after a home loss to Providence, UConn fans were more often left with thoughts of how they stacked up against other potential bubble teams than how they stacked up against the nation’s best. But a ten game winning streak including wins against four top twenty-five ranked teams (Marquette, @Indiana, Pittsburgh, Notre Dame) change all that.

Now sitting a only ½ game back of Georgetown and Louisville in the conference, the Huskies look to take advantage of a stretch run of five conference opponents with a combined Big East record of 27-40 as the make a serious bid at the regular season Big East crown and the #1 seed in Madison Square Garden where past national champion UConn teams have begun their run.

With a strong overall schedule (SOS: #11), a Husky regular season and Big East tournament championship could easily mean a #2 seed (from where Ben Gordon and Emeka Okafor led the Huskies to their last national title.

Looking at the upcoming schedule and the possibility of returning Jerome Dyson to the lineup for the stretch run, it is hard to foresee the Huskies slipping below a #4 seed in the dance without a meltdown of catastrophic proportions.

You can read the rest here: Husky Connection at MVN

Here’s a little teaser:

So with a better lineup and a less dominant pitching staff, where does that leave the Red Sox next season? In the chart above, I turned to Pythagorean Win Expectancy and plugged in my runs scored and runs against ballparks to settle in with 98 wins. You can also see Baseball Prospectus’ slightly more scientific run +/- predictions and outcome using PECOTA numbers.

Realistically, I think Pythagoras does us a bit wrong here and overestimates wins based on this input, but I do think that PECOTA short changes the team by a few wins. So for my final answer, “for better or worse”, I think the 2008 team is every bit as good as the 2007 version.

My gut: About the same. While Pythagoras has me at 98 wins, that feels aggressive, but I think back to back 96 win seasons and A.L. East banners sound pretty good to me. So mark it down. 96-66, 1st place in the American League East, 2nd best record in baseball behind the New York Mets.

Note: I can’t upload to YouTube because of the Treo’s video format and Google Video embed in WordPress.com blogs can’t be resized and doesn’t fit my template.

Having been a sports radio junkie my entire life, growing up on WFAN in Connecticut and then living with WEEI in Boston as a daily ritual for the past 10 years, I was extremely excited to be invited to preview the Red Sox 2008 season with Colin and Durden on Blog Talk Radio.

I called into their show last night and spoke for about 20 minutes about topics ranging from the rotation to the Yankees. All in all, it was an excellent experience. I did better than expected and didn’t cringe at all listening to myself this morning.

Here’s a link to the show archive and I’ve embedded the MP3 into this post below as well. If you want to skip to my interview, hit up the 24:30 mark of the show.

This experience has definitely given me the motivation to look into hosting a weekly show of my own on Blog Talk Radio, YouCastr, or MVN’s podcast section.

If you happen to take a listen, feel free to leave some feedback in the comments.

– Fire Brand of the American League: 2008 Red Sox Bullpen: For Better or Worse
– Husky Connection: It’s all about tempo and we’ve got Tha-beet

My Husky column is currently being featured on the front page of MVN’s NCAA section.

I’ll be speaking with the hosts of “On the Field with Colin and Durden” over at BlogTalkRadio live tomorrow at 9:55 pm. You can find the link here to listen live or to hit up the archive of the event the following morning.

The interest in Will.i.am’s remix of Barack Obama’s speech after the New Hampshire primaries has drifted well into the “Scattered Brilliance” domain.  I am currently ranked #4 on google search results for combinations of [Obama yes we can lyrics] pointing to this post from last week.

As you can see in the graph below, traffic to this post has been high and is growing.  All of this traffic is coming from organic searches for the text of Obama’s speech that the song was set to.

Outside of knowing that people would be searching for these lyrics, because that’s one of the first things I did, and knowing that wordpress posts rank disproportionately high in Google’s algorithm, primarily due to page title and meta data from the post title itself, I didn’t do much to SEO this post.

It makes you think how blogs have changed the currency of search results.