At just over a year and a half old, we've come a long way with The Cleveland Fan in a short time. I'm constantly recruiting new talent, and the quality of the journalism has risen exponentially. The message board forums have become very active, and a haven for great sports talk. We've added features like the "Pick ‘Em & Click ‘Em" game, and bettered the look and feel of the site. And this spring, we were fortunate to partner with the great people over at Sportstime Ohio, helping to supply them with front page content for their growing website.
Today we officially add a new feature that's been in the back of my mind for some time, and a feature that I feel will be a really cool addition to the site that we'll be able to do a number of different things with in the years to follow. It's a bracketing module that allows us to custom build brackets on any topic, and let the visitors of the site vote to determine who advances from round to round.
Some of you may have seen it already, as we've had it up for beta testing for the last couple of weeks. We have two brackets up presently.
The 32 Greatest Moments in Cleveland Sports History: 1965-2007
The 64 Best Actors In Hollywood
First round match-ups are set, and voting is underway for both. If you haven't yet, go vote now.
Sportstime Ohio really liked and embraced the brackets, and in addition to promoting it on the front page of their site, are having me on "All Bets Are Off With Bruce Drennan" today at 5:30 to break down the first round match-ups with Bruce. We'll keep first round voting open for another week, and then advance the winners to the next round next Tuesday morning ... at which point you'll be able to come back and vote on all of the second round matchups.
The team over here at TCF is already brainstorming potential topics for future brackets, as we're not limited to doing just one or two at a time. Some of the ideas that have came up are ...
~The 64 Greatest Venues in Sports
~The 32 Greatest Moments in the History of the Browns-Steelers Rivalry
~The 32 (64?) Most Heartbreaking Moments in Cleveland Sports History
~The 32 Greatest Athletes in Cleveland Sports History
~The 32 Greatest Cleveland Sportswriters/Broadcasters/Media Members
~The 64 Greatest Individual Performances in Cleveland Sports History
~The 64 Greatest Area Athletes
Also, we're thinking along these lines as well ...
~The 64 Greatest Movies of All-Time
~The 64 Greatest Actresses in Hollywood
~The 64 Sexiest Female Celebrities
~The 32 Greatest Restaurants In Cleveland
~The 32 Greatest Cleveland Area Attractions
~The 32 Greatest Sitcoms Ever Made
As you can see, this is something we can have a lot of fun with. It's something we've invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into creating and developing, but I really feel that it will be a great long term addition for the site, just as the Pick ‘Em & Click ‘Em has become.
If anyone has any suggestions on brackets, comments, kudos, criticisms ... we want to hear them!!!
Thanks again for making The Cleveland Fan a daily stop.