BallHyped.com: New Sports Social Voting Community Site Launches Public Beta

PASO ROBLES, CA, October 17, 2010 (Press-News.org) A lot has been said and written about social voting communities of late.

Digg's redesign is getting "buried" by many in the blogosphere.

Great niche communities like Propeller and the Daily Radar sites have announced they're shutting down in recent weeks, prompting headlines like Search Engine Land's "Social Voting Sites Dying & Struggling."

But those same bloggers (SearchEngineLand, for example, is a niche site that specifically covers search engine news) should know better than anyone that on today's saturated Web, where everything has been done a dozen times over, niche communities are the last frontier.

Which is why we've started BallHyped.com, in the face of the corporate world's vote-up failures.

BallHyped is a niche sports social voting community for sports fans and bloggers, by sports fans and bloggers. The site was started earlier this month and has wasted no time moving from a private to a public beta so sports fans, bloggers and writers can share the best content the sports world and blogosphere have to offer.

So why now?

Well, it's no secret the recent closures of sites like Propeller and Daily Radar's sites left thousands of bloggers and fans in the dark. We were part of those communities and thought to ourselves, why not build a sports vote-up community of our own?

That's what http://ballhyped.com/ is - a social vote-up site that's all about its community, highlighting the best sports news, commentary and blogs from around the sports world. The site even has forums and resource sections dedicated to helping bloggers and writers hone their craft, helping improve the quality of content in the community at the same time.

Why name it BallHyped.com?

Because the domain was available, and it had a nice ring to it?

We'd be lying if we didn't admit BallHyped.com was named (in the past tense) in honor of one of our favorite, fallen sports communities, but it also puts an emphasis on what the heart of this community is all about - GETTING HYPED!

BallHyped.com is about fans, and bloggers, getting hyped about their favorite teams. We know the lines are getting blurred between objective sports reporting and crazed fandom in the blogosphere, and we're OK with that. In fact, that's what the BallHyped.com community and its editors are here for, to remove the spam and worthless content that floods our other social voting communities, and hype up the quality content that deserves getting HYPED!

What makes BallHyped.com different?

As mentioned above, http://ballhyped.com/ has quality control and an editorial process, and all links/blogs/articles that are submitted are reviewed by an editor before being published. Spam is not tolerated, and neither is plagiarism nor content that doesn't add value to the BallHyped.com community.

And unlike other social voting sites, BallHyped.com offers a blogger resource area and forum for the contributors in the community, offering blogging tips, how-tos and other articles on writing, designing/developing a blog, marketing your content, SEO, as well as a blogging job postings, a Q&A advice forum, guest blog database and forum where blog owners can post blogs wanted requests.

Staying true to its core competency, the site also allows users to comment on and share their "hyped" posts via their favorite social media sites. To avoid the misuse of copyrighted photos (which many voting sites allow without a second thought), BallHyped.com instead captures a screenshot of the site that originally produced the post hyped on-site, and links back to that original site at least twice per post.

BallHyped.com's editors also go the extra yard and promote contributed content on a handful of their own social media sites along with optimizing posts for SEO. Posts submitted on BallHyped.com during the private beta period averaged an 80% increase in traffic over non-hyped posts, and that number is expected to increase as more and more users join the community.

The site has also made it easy for bloggers to get their content promoted on BallHyped.com with share-it badges they will easily embed into their personal blog sidebar or posts.

Who is behind BallHyped.com?

Ballhyped.com is a collaboration of ideas founder and longtime sports blogger Brian Milne dreamed up for nearly a decade as a senior sportswriter, columnist and editor for McClatchy newspapers.

And now that he's no longer in the newspaper industry, he's able to act on some of those ideas.

But Milne and the BallHyped team admit they could use help, because unlike other corporate-powered communities, BallHyped.com is a simple endeavor started by a very small team of volunteers.

"BallHyped will go as far as the community wants to take it," Milne said. "We're here because the other social vote-up sites we loved failed their communities. Instead of focusing on what mattered - the bloggers, editors and fanatics who made the communities what they were - they only cared about the bottom line.

"While we understand we still have a ways to go in making BallHyped.com the best sports community it can be, we think we're off to a good start considering it's been a one-person operation over the past month. I'm looking forward to seeing just how far we can take this site with the help of our community. If our private beta testing was any indicator, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the sports world GETS HYPED too!"

For more information or to learn how you can contribute to BallHyped, visit http://ballhyped.com/.