Will you add my blog? podcast?

Written by Sports Aggregator Staff

We might! We're always looking for quality Canadian sports content, but consistency, quality, and balance are important to us.

We'll consider adding a blog or podcast if:

it's mostly one-team-specific content
it's at least one year old
it has quality content
it has a good user experience
it's regularly updated (not necessarily often)
there's room in the blog or podcast section

The age (at least one-year old) criteria is a very significant factor. If you're still going strong into season 2, then you're surely passionate and committed. In a lot of ways, this levels the playing field for new creators/sites, and helps to keep the quality up while newer entities work through the bumps.

We love the incredible energy and enthusiasm that often comes with new blogs or podcasts, but many (most?) succumb to the soul-crushing thanklessness of starting from scratch. Or, you know, you get scooped up by an established site that already has an audience and promotional channels, and start blogging or podcasting there.

Quality of content and user experience is somewhat objective, of course, but there are definitely standards that need to be met. For instance, in the past, we declined to add a blog because posts were numerous and typically around 100 words. There’s nothing wrong with a site like this; it’s useful to its users or it wouldn’t have a following, but we didn’t feel as though it added anything to our particular mix of content. We have declined to add podcasts because the sound quality was so poor that we thought they would be a poor experience for our users. We’re not looking to be arbiters of quality, in fact, we’re trying to remove ourselves and our biases (we all have ‘em) from this process as much as possible.

We’re always trying to balance different types of content as well. When something newsworthy occurs, we want to see beat-writers, columnists, radio, video, blogs, AND podcasts. If we have too many blogs or podcasts (or any source type) then they can overwhelm other content, so we may decline or wait on a source until there is room.

Over the years, these criteria have helped us be consistent and fair with content creators while keeping the quality high.

We design a very specific and detailed crawler configuration for each source we track. It takes time. Each, and there are hundreds, configuration is monitored on an ongoing basis for any changes to ensure quality content is being discovered and interpreted properly.

We wanted a better way to discover, keep tabs on, and promote, a wider array of blogs and podcasts, so we created...

The Blog Tracker & Podcast Tracker

We add every team-specific blog or podcast we find to its team's respective Blog/Podcast Tracker. Here we track EVERY Blue Jays, Raptors, Maple Leafs, Canadiens, Canucks, Flames, Oilers, Senators, Jets, and TFC blog/pod we can find, new or old, large or small, witty or boorish. We send our crawler at different times of the day to retrieve new content, and present links to recent content for each, with content from the last 48 hours displayed automatically. If a blog (or podcast) hasn't posted in over a year, it falls off the list and no longer gets crawled.

The Blue Jays Blog Tracker has tracked over 150 Jays blogs since 2010, including 100+ in the Inactive section.

The Raptors Podcast Tracker, for example, has tracked 40+ Raptors Podcasts since 2017. It's a terrific list of affiliated and independent podcasts, big or small, new or old.

We use these pages a lot to monitor and pick new blogs and podcasts for the main site.

If you have (or know of) a blog or podcast that's not on our list, please let us know.

Will you add my blog? podcast?

The Blog Tracker & Podcast Tracker

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