sports

The winter games are just around the corner and that means Olympic Hockey!

The schedule is out and looking pretty interesting. Can't wait for the games to begin...

USA Men's definite games are as follows:

2/16 – Switzerland [3:00 PM]
2/18 – Norway [3:00 PM]
2/21 – Canada [7:00 PM]

Full schedule is available at the Vancouver 2010 Games site

It has been a very interesting week on the web. For those of you who aren't aware, my brothers and I started up a little blog about the Pittsburgh Penguins called I Bleed Black 'n Gold. We started it up at the beginning of this NHL season with the primary goals of staying up to date on team news and stories as well as a means to practice building a site and user community.

The network of Penguins and Pittsburgh sports bloggers is interesting as there are quite a few folks, all willing and most helpful of new blogs. Not that we've been around all that long, but we are now able to provide support and guidance to some of the newer guys as was given to us. Anyhow, we knew it would be important to uniquely position ourselves in this already saturated market. With so many blogs covering scores, stats and generic team news and doing a superb job at it, we looked to the media and entertainment sector. So far this has been a successful choice as we often receive requests to edit, share and create Pens related media for users and other bloggers alike. When we do cover scores or game highlights, posts are typically in the tone of entertainment and uncovering unique points.

In our goal to build interesting and interactive media assets, we've recently been toying around with sound clips. Putting Pens related sound bytes to background beats and seeing what we can come up with. As we cut, spliced and edited clips, it became apparent that a soundboard would be fun to try and create. Building the buttons and images in Flash and making it all function was a piece of cake once adjustments of all the clips were complete. So far we've done soundboards for Evgeni Malkin and Maxime Talbot with more on the way.

Apparently, people are enjoying the soundboards quite a bit. We have seen them pop up in a couple places around the web and just had to mention these two instances.

First, as avid listeners of Pittsburgh's Kiss FM Morning Freak Show radio program, we were blown away when we heard that Mikey and Big Bob decided to utilize the Evgeni Malkin soundboard on air. The resulting gag phone call turned out pretty epic and we were super proud that they actually used our board. Give the show a listen:

A few days after we posted the Malkin board, we finished up and set live the Max Talbot version. Max's was a bit more extensive with almost double the clips. As buzz built and people started checking out the Max board, we were shocked. It turns out that Greg Wyshynski editor of the Puck Daddy blog on Yahoo! Sports decided to drop a link to the Talbot board is his post: Puck Headlines: Preds rookie beefcake; Anaheim lucky or good?

Puck Daddy is one of the most entertaining and widely visited blogs by hockey fans, not to mention it is part of the Yahoo! network. Greg and his team of contributors, Ross McKeon, Sean Leahy, Matt Romig, Dmitry Chesnokov, The Two-Line Pass and Margee keep hockey fans entertained yet extremely informed as they are consistently one of the first to publish breaking news. Long story short, Puck Daddy is highly renown in the hockey world.

We were amazed when we started seeing traffic to I Bleed Black 'n Gold spike like crazy. Not that we check it all that often, but the influx of visitors from the PD link ate up all the bandwidth we had for a couple of hours. It was an honor to be mentioned by Greg Wyshynski himself and we are super glad that people are enjoying both of the soundboards and the IBBnG blog in general. Plenty more to come.

As if last year wasn't a surprise enough, Danica Patrick will again unite sport with modeling in the 2009 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Some of the photos from the magazine shoot are also up at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit site

The advertising campaign for the Penguins 2008 -2009 season is based around the slogan "A Great Day for Hockey". At first, I was a little apprehensive, but like all sports campaigns, it grows on you game after game.

One of my favorite aspects of the Great Day for Hockey ad push is the main commercial featured in the mix...

The second edition to one of my favorite commercials of all time has finally been distributed to the web.

Pittsburghers, hockey fans and online video audiences alike have all enjoyed the local commercials for A&L Motors.

Here is part two, Maxime's superstar solo in the spotlight: