In the comments section of this post: [Link] - I made a link to a graph that some users cannot see unless they register. Here is the actual graph. I post it here for a reference as to how my, "little blog," as Craig Lord called it is actually doing stat wise.
22 comments:
Keep up the good work Tony! I love your blog.
eduard
I love youth faith in web stats...i can tell you they are wildly wrong... a quick glance at your stats tells me that, if they are correct, you don't get a 10th of the traffic SwimNews gets...the world rankings alone generate more traffic than you on a daily basis... I'd ask for your money back
Again, you never reference anything you say. I posted a link and a screen shot.
I somewhat agree with Craig that many times the webstats are off. I use internal numbers on my site, which I'm sure we all do.
Craig, since you have advertising on your site, what numbers do you claim to justify what you charge? Just curious cause that's always tricky since you have to somehow justify that.
Glenn, I genuinely do noT have permission to reveal such stats. I know from my work as Deputy Editor of Times Online that such info, and the specifics of it, is highly sensitive. It genuinely is not my info to give, and so I won't... I just DIDdn't want TonY to get a big head... it would only make all that squeezing into his shiny suit alL the more troublesome. X
Right, enough of all this.
Thanks for stopping by, Craig. You definitely demonstrated that everything I noted about how you approach your work and how professional you can be was 100% accurate.
Pleasure. But you haven't been accurate since you allowed spleen to drive your brain, Tony.
Just for clarification Craig, I'm a tech suit lover too, but as a coach as well, I'll play by whatever rules the swimmers are subjected to, just as I played by the rules when the suits were legal.
I actually think if you worried about Tony getting a big head, you probably shouldn't spend so much time trying to justify yourself to him. That he got your goat so much is going to do much more than some stat site's numbers. Just my opinion.
Thanks for the explanation on the stats. I guess since I'm a 2 person operation, it's much easier for me to get access to all that stuff... just don't know what it's like working for such a huge organization. Congrats on that.
What an incomprehensible insult.
Glenn,
The rules argument I have heard befORe and while it works at the surface, it falls apart in the deep. In caricature, if FINA said you can all take steroids, would you? Or would you feel obliged as a guardian of young folk to stand up and say something? If a military man was to arrive and show you that the suiT on your kid's back, one that lookED exactly like the one in the next lane, was actually doing something much more than you had ever imagined pOssible, would you notn feel obliged to question it, rules or nO rules?
And on Tony, it is the same liNe of thought. Neither he nor suits got my goat. They reflected falsehood - and that demands ResPonse.
And now I really must go. Enjoy the swimming.
Craig,
The steroids comparison is, I'm sorry, just dumb. One is clearly against the rules, and has potentially harmful health impact, and the other is simply a costume, which was legal.
I don't know if you coach or not, and I don't even know if you swim. With that said, the rules argument indeed holds water, because a coach is given the task of getting the swimmers to perform up to their best ability. No matter what the suit is, the athlete is working as hard as possible, as is the coach. The constant talk about "now swimmers will have to train harder", is such BS. ALL the swimmers at the level you care about work incredibly hard.
Your argument is more along the lines of equality and fairness.
I've posted many times in this argument, that there is not, has never been, and will never be, an even playing field in athletics. It's a harsh world out there, and no matter what you do in life, there will be times when someone next to you has been unfairly given an upper hand.
You seem to want to break this down to the simplicity of a suit, but it goes much deeper and I would without a doubt, know that you know that.
I won't bore you anymore with things that I'm sure you understand about, weight training, filming, having physical therapists on staff, nutritionists, etc. etc. etc. of certain athletes that others don't have access to. How are you going to control that to level the playing field.
Again, I don't know if you coach, but when one of my swimmers gets beat by someone who has a clear advantage, whether it's better goggles, or over the past couple of years, a better suit, or a better physiology, I don't go crying to FINA and ask them to help me... I take my athlete back to the pool, and teach them how to go faster.
Now... question my ethics by bringing up the rules thing again. I volunteer coach, charge no money for it, and have for the past 10 years. I do it because it makes me a better teacher, and a better coach, which hopefully makes my products better able to help swimmers.
And don't worry... I did enjoy my swims today, and my coaching. I hope with all the excitement in your world today, you had a chance to do the same.
By the way, if you do coach, I apologize, and I hope your swimmers do great. If you do swim, we've started a video evaluation program on my site, and I'd love to help. :)
PS Craig. Come on... get a new keyboard already. ;)
Glenn - I absolutely agree with you regards athletics, especially at the elite level, being an uneven playing field: Someone always has an advantage.
Where I differ from you is the nature of that advantage: I have no problems accepting genetic differences. Everyone who competes at the elite level has to come to terms with the fact that, at a certain point - if you are very lucky - you reach a point where that's all you've got. You're as fast as you're ever going to go. You're at the limit of your genetic ability.
The challenge I had with the suits was this: They conveyed benefit unequally - some suits were better than others - and they were unevenly distributed. Not everyone that wanted one could get one.
If you had the right suit, you had advantage over someone who did not have the right suit, for whatever reason.
The way of the techsuit was, it seemed to me, an endless race of technological "one-up manship", where having the latest tech trumped better swimming. That had to stop. FINA had to act, either by standardizing techsuit properties or banning them.
For a number of reasons - all legit - banning them made more sense. Those reasons included age group swimming, the nature the benefit they provided, how you'd check who was wearing what... I could outline them ad nausem but that that's not the point of this post.
Every sport - or almost every sport - has run into this tech problem. All - skiing, tennis, speed-skating, etc. - have come to terms with the tech issue by enforcing strict standards outlining what is allowed from a equipment perspective. If they didn't - and, by extension, if FINA didn't - the sport would become farce.
And, FYI, I am long past my elite days but, just to qualify my remarks, I got enough to know I wasn't that good. I have also coached and I am now an official and an administrator. I am also, too, a swim parent.
And, just as a closing note, in my humble opinion, we should all take a bit of chill pill here: All of us commenting here have more in common than not. We all love this sport. Let's not forget that.
Ted. Precisely. On all counts. regards to all. Enjoy the swimming... as I have throughout my life and will continue to do so.
Hey Ted,
Good answer, and I'm sure you'll be surprised to hear I agree. I have always agreed that things got a bit out of hand.
Where my biggest problem lies is in the over correction FINA made in adjusting the rules.
Nobody complained when the bodysuits first came out. For nearly a decade, people were accustomed to these "fabric" suits being the norm. In fact, one of the most glorified swimmers, Ian Thorpe stood on the blocks at the Olympics in a full body, full armed suit, a few lanes away from a guy in a brief. Level playing field?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaneChQkX3w
While all the arguments have been stated, one of the reasons I get upset over this is hypothetical arguments that come out of left field that accuse people of somehow wanting less out of the sport than those who think the suits were bad.
I'm just always confused as to why we went back nearly 10 years in technology, made new rules, and yet, jammers are still fetching close to $300. There could have been some middle ground met in my opinion, but then again, FINA didn't ask.
Anyway... didn't need the chill pill, went for a swim this morning, taught a couple lessons. I let my "in water" work cleanse my swimming soul, and the typing left mostly to others... like Tony. Who I really enjoy reading. :)
First and foremost, thanks for the entertainment from some of the best writers in the swimming community.
I feel all the relevant information is already in the comments section, and I wish I would have made this party earlier!
Swim on!
Craig Lord,
Swimnews ranking is a crap. I don't know why you are so proud of it. Japan Open has been finished for a week and none of its results has been added into the ranking yet, however Austin Grand Pix held later has been counted in. swimmingworldmagazine has done much more timely reports on these meets and given links to full results.
Traffic is a measure on websites, but not necessarily the most important one. Swimnews, which constantly vilifies some swimmers while praising some others based on personal preference/interest, which doesn't dare to spare some space for readers' comment, is no way a good one, however high its traffic is.
WOW! 5-stars for insightful!
"it would only make all that squeezing into his shiny suit alL the more troublesome"
@Craig Lord
The suits aren't that shiny. They are actually kind of flat. More of like a matte.
Try one on sometime, they're fun :)
Trevor wore his first tech suit at the Cal Tech Pentathlon today; a blueseventy along with b70 carbonite goggles. He raved more about the goggles than the tech suit.
USMS is a forward thinking organization that has decided to put the swimmer first in Short Course Yards and the FINA governing body where it belongs, both long course and short course.
British Swimming is following the USMS lead.
Tim. Swimnews ranking is the best and most up to date tool in the world of its kind. It is not mine, nor is Swimnews. I just write. Pride would this be somewhat misplaced. Your bitterness is therefore misdirected and will hurt others, not me. As for the results of the Japan Open, we carried a link to the official results on the Open site, as in e=this report... https://www.swimnews.com/News/view/7475
, Swimming World took the feed or copied and pasted. Either way, the reader could get to the results. And readers are pretty sophisticated creatures - they get to omega live timing and Seiko timing etc themselves without much help from anyone...
As for timely reports, you have to think a little more deeply. When a meet is based in Europe, guess what, I get there first. When a meet takes place at European time 2am, I tend not to stay awake for all of them. As for reader comments. If you want to send a big fat cheque in every month so we can employ a moderator, maybe the owners of swimnews would consider it. But the model that exists on this and many other blogs of allowing profanities and insults any time something doesn't go your way is not really something they feel obliged to entertain. No one has villified any swimmer or favoured one of another. The result sheet and behaviour does that for itself. I did call a couple of swimmers and coaches out for telling fibs and misrepresenting the truth on shiny suits (i saw lots of them, and the Jakeds etc were definitively shiny, no question) and I stand by every word I wrote, with a great deal of support from very many readers who communicate with SwimNews on a regular basis, offering support, criticism and disagreement.
I stand corrected. The Jaked suits are DEFINITELY shiny.
I want one.
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