Work Smarter, Not Harder

Why on Earth I should spend time saying what I want to say when someone else has already done it for me is a question I can't answer. So, hopefully this will be the only time I have to completely rob someone's fine work.

As I had mentioned last week, or ealier this week, I have an announcement to make regarding my future. I am extremely excited to announce that I will be joining with bloggers from all over the college football blogosphere to write for AOL Sports. This doesn't mean that I will stop writing here, or on We Must Ignite This Couch, but my main focus will be on this new venture. And with that, I will now steal from Matt @ Orange 44.

This college football season AOL Sports is launching a project called the "College Football FanHouse." Jamie Mottram, the host of AOL's Sports Bloggers Live and the author of Mr. Irrelevant, is serving as the endeavor's editor-in-chief.

The initiative has been explained as follows:

AOL Sports is building an interactive College Football Index and series of team pages powered by a network of blogs. It will be written by dozens of Individual Contributors around the country and overseen by a handful of Lead Bloggers.

The Blog network will serve as the content platform for AOL'’s team pages. Visitors to the current site who navigate to the Oklahoma Sooners page will enter the Sooner House, where they'’ll find an active Sooner blog leading the page.

Posts will be tagged and fed into dozens of specific blogs. For example, when a blog about OklahomaÂ’s Adrian Peterson resuming his Heisman campaign against Washington is posted it gets tagged College Football, Big 12, Oklahoma, Peterson, Heisman and Washington. The post then publishes to the top of the corresponding index pages and blog lists.

The tagging will communicate across indexes as they launch. So the College Basketball index will pull in Oklahoma Basketball posts into the Sooner House along with the Oklahoma Football posts. Subsequent NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL blog indexes will be organized into geographic communities. The Pittsburgh House will feature entries about the Steelers, Pirates, Penguins, Pitt Panthers, etc. There will be a FanHouse for all cities, schools, teams, etc.

AOL FanHouse writers are encouraged to continue their non-AOL blogging interests. However, content that'’s posted on outside blogs should not be duplicated on AOL blogs. AOL is not attempting to syndicate blog content from around the web. Rather, the goal is to bring the best bloggers together under one roof to create a comprehensive College Football site with content and commentary and conversation that can'’t be found elsewhere. We hope we can make it worth it to you to do so.

While the content of one'’s AOL blog should not blatantly promote the writer'’s non-AOL site, we want you to benefit from your relationship with AOL Sports. Each post made includes a byline with the author'’s name or internet handle linked to the author'’s AIM Page.

Finally, the final blogger roster for the FanHouse has not been completed yet. However, AOL is still seeking writers for the following teams:

Alabama
Colorado
Florida
Florida State
Georgia
Maryland
Miami
Minnesota
UCLA

If you (1) have a passion for any of these teams; (2) are literate and can lucidly convey thoughts and comments about these universities; and (3) have time to contribute, drop me an email or leave a comment and I'll recommend you for the project.

If you cover any of the above mentioned teams, feel free to contact me and I will get you connected with the right people. I'll have more on this in the next week or so.