On Monday, I attended TWTRCON 2010 at the Hilton New York (quite the glided hotel, by the way.) It was exciting to finally be in a professional development opportunity that aligns with my current position and what I wish to do in the future, instead of those student affairs conferences that I always felt entirely out of place at (I’m not a fan of the icebreaker). Plus, I was able to meet a great deal of folks I had conversed with for years on Twitter, but hadn’t ever met in person, which is always awesome.

Before I jumped on my bus home, I met a friend for a beer at the new Brewery in Port Authority (convenient for those times that you want to be sedated before taking a Greyhound bus any length of time, which is most of the time) and he excitedly asked me how it was. He’s the more coherent and thought-out version of what I told him over a yummy Apricot Beer:

- Martha Stewart ended up being the perfect keynote speaker. I was quite skeptical of the Queen of Domesticity’s inclusion in a conference on social media, mainly because I’m not a huge fan of her in general. However, her interview was refreshing because she was eagerly unguarded. Nothing she said was groomed. To me, her speaking about navigating online pop culture and social media is a great guide about how to interact with a demographic that is quickly adoring social media: 40-60 year old women. The higher education takeaway of that: most of the parents you program to in higher education are 40-60 year old women.

I did take issue with one of Martha’s points, however. She mentioned that she Tweets all herself – unless she calls her assistant and “dictates” a Tweet to him. “I don’t believe in ghost-tweeting,” she proclaimed. “That’s not what Twitter is for.” Dictating a Tweet over the phone to your assistant is still, in my eyes, using a ghost-tweeter. In what form is that Tweet? Is it a thought? Is it perfectly within 140 characters? Or is she just saying, “Hey Elian, just tweet something about something. I haven’t tweeted in a while”? Any way that dictating comes, I argue that Martha still has a ghost-tweeter. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

- If I’m (or my company) is spending a significant registration fee (above $200) on a conference, don’t waste my time. I loved everything about Twtrcon – great speakers, kept-to schedule, convenient set-up, useful amenities – save for the 20 minutes they wasted interviewing “BP Terry” from “BPGlobalPR.” I think the account will go down as one of the best uses of parody social media in the medium’s young history, but he brought no value to the conference. He wore a penguin suit, stayed in character the whole time, and is not the world’s best standup comic. If he had been willing to chat as the man behind the parody – even if he had to remain disguised – that would be useful to attendees. But as a comedic break, it was not needed, went on much too long, and grated on my nerves.

- Type on slides needed to be 36 point or higher, or get rid of it. This thought is coming from someone who spends her summers creating, editing, troubleshooting and running presentation slideshows (it’s part of my job), so I’m somewhat overly critical on the subject. A few of the case studies were marred by poorly laid out slides and text so small it was unreadable from any angle. The text also blended in with the background. My pro tip: if you must have text laid on top of a picture, make a transparent box in a silvery gray or teal blue and lay in between the picture and text. Volia! – your picture is unmarred and your text is readable. (I’ll make a video showing how to do this better in the coming days.)

Bonus Takeaways, in ellipse format! The Return on Investment debate is bigger than I thought – there was quite the camp at Twtrcon who didn’t understand the need for metrics, and a camp that hungered for new ways, old ways, any ways to measure engagement to report back to bosses….Speaking of metrics, one note I took away from the first panel of the morning was to not overlook the easy to measure metrics – if you run a promotion via Twitter, make sure to actually note how many people take advantage of it. That sometimes can be overlooked….Quote from the location based services session: “What do you already do that is tied to geography? Pinpoint that, and squeeze it further.”….The field of social media is so new that it is inspiring to attend any conference on the subject, because it makes you feel like you could contribute significantly to the discourse of the medium if you merely applied yourself…

(In the coming days, I’ll be writing up a more higher ed specific wrap-up of TWTRCON for the BU Social Media Communicators Blog, which I’ll make sure to link to.)

To prepare for both, check out my overview of the University of Virginia baseball team and their dominance thus far this season for The College Baseball Blog, and my overview of Notre Dame men’s lacrosse team and their surprise appearance in the Final Four after a so-so season for Examiner.

I promise original content will return to this blog this weekend, when I have time to sit down and write for hours on end.

Kevin Roeder won the ECHL Kelly Cup this weekend with the Cincinnati Cyclones. (Photo: Shawn Raecke \ Idaho Statesman)

- Former Miami defenseman Kevin Roeder would be getting absolutely sick by journalists reminding him that Colby Cohen’s winning shot in the 2009 National Championship game deflected off him, but he’s too busy winning the ECHL Kelly Cup with the Cincinnati Cyclones.

- Frozen Four participant Wisconsin announced their 2010-11 schedule on Thursday, including confirmation that they will face BU in the opening round of the Icebreaker Tournament on October 8th. This year’s Icebreaker takes place in St. Louis, MO at the Scottrade Center, and also includes Notre Dame and Holy Cross. BU won the Icebreaker in October 2008, when it was hosted at Agganis Arena; Wisconsin last participated in the Icebreaker in 2002.

- In other neutral game site news, Union will play Jerry D’Amigo and the RPI Engineers in Lake Placid on October 30th. Union will also be a part of the Dodge Holiday Classic, along with Ferris State, Bemidji State and Minnesota, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

- Denver joined Wisconsin and Union in releasing their schedule this week, and have already boasted/complained about how tough it is. Yes, if you lost as many players to the pros and were bounced in the first round of the NCAA Regionals after jockeying for the number 1 ranking all season, you would be complaining about everything possible as well.

- No, BU fans, you’re not seeing crazy things on future University of Minnesota-Duluth rosters. Their Adam Krause plays offense and adds a “e” at the end of Kraus. Krause will play for the USHL’s Chicago Steel next season, before reporting to Duluth in 2011.

NHL: St. Louis Blues

Last night, the St. Louis Blues mixed their St. Patrick’s Day commemoration with environmental awareness, and gave away a “Green Game” t-shirt to all fans in attendance (quite a risky claim to advertise – from personal experience, you should always give an exact number of giveaways, a la “first 5,000 fans”). The shirt giveaway was sponsored by Monsanto, a Cambridge, MA based agricultural innovation company with an emphasis on sustainable practices. This was the second year for the Blues promotion.

Shirt Grade: B I like the muted, antiquey kelly green shirt and faded style of the print. It also helps that the Blues’ team colors happen not to horribly clash with green. Kudos for using that to their advantage and not changing the logo’s colors for the holiday’s sake. Environmental awareness initiatives during games are the new “it” thing to do in sports marketing – trust me, I participate in one – but the giveaway needs to be backed up with sustained, but subtle, green initiatives, otherwise it is just a t-shirt giveaway.

AHL: Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins

The Baby Pens (speaking of, we are long overdue for an edition of The Everyone’s Favorite Goalie Watch, but that’ll be another post) are selling two St. Patrick’s Day long sleeve shirts in their online store. The 2009 edition ($20) features their mascot, Tux, skating with a four leaf clover in the background on the front. The back reads “Happy St. Patrick’s Day.” The 2010 version ($22) features the logo in what appears to be a very dark green (nearly black), with a four leaf clover on the sleeve. Long sleeve shirts are always key in that part of Pennsylvania, where the damp gray chilly days seem to out number any other weather.

Grade: C The effort is there, but the execution is not. The 2009 version is too campy, and the 2010 version shows promise, but the green seems too dark. Kudos, however, for the 2010 edition’s four leaf clover on the sleeve.

ECHL: Gwinnett Gladiators

The ECHL Gwinnett Gladiators teamed with Old Time Hockey, the same Salisbury, MA based company who partnered to create some of the NHL’s 2010 St. Patrick’s Day gear, to create a green t-shirt to sell this March. The shirt ($20 with free shipping through today) features a rather disturbed and surly looking leprechaun brandishing a hockey stick, with a small Gladiators logo by his right foot. The all-caps font is rather 1950s style, and arches above Surly Leprechaun’s head.

Grade: A This is the first ever St. Patrick’s Day shirt I would ever consider purchasing, and not just because I’m in the market for a shirt from the team where two of my most favorite former BU hockey alums play. What sold me was the 1950s fonts – I’m a sucker for fonts. Plus, I feel like Surly Leprechaun is going to hurt me with that hockey stick if I don’t like the shirt.

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Luke Popko in the 2009 Hockey East Championship Game (InsideHockey.com)

While livetweeting the Beanpot for BU Today last week, I remarked how much I enjoyed watching BU senior forward Luke Popko on the penalty kill. He may be diminutive, but he is one of the most effective penalty killers I have ever seen. He is especially effective when BU is two men down. He also doesn’t shy away from blocking a shot, and stays out there and gets peppered, often barely limping off the ice after taking several shots to his body. He truly plays like a second goalie, just without the extra padding.

During the Beanpot championship game this Monday (which BU lost 4-3), I was watching Popko on the penalty kill for the seemingly millionth time in the past four years when it finally hit me. Popko is a short, extremely effective, and fearless special teamer.

He is, by analogy, the Steve Tasker of the Boston University Terriers.

For those of you who think Tasker was just the sideline reporter for Sunday’s Super Bowl (who had the un-enviable task of interviewing Indianapolis Colts head coach Jim Caldwell post-game), au contraire. Tasker, as much as Doug Flutie, is every short Western New Yorker male’s inspiration for living. (Just ask my 5-6 tall father.) He was a member of the Buffalo Bills for 13 years, playing from 1985-1997.

Tasker is considered by many football journalists, football players and the like to be the greatest special teams player to play football in the modern era. He was tiny – listed as 5-9, but that must have been when he was wearing the Buffaloian uniform of five layers of socks, huge snow boots, and standing on a snow drift – but was fearless, throwing himself at punters and kickers, tackling kick returners twice his size by the ankles, and speeding down the field like a stolen Ferrari at 3am on kick returns.

He got kicked in the head, he got flattened by men double his size, and yet he yearned for more playing time. He rarely got looks at wide receiver (much like Popko is mired on the fourth line), but when he did, he made the most of them. Quarterback Jim Kelly begged head coach Marv Levy to insert him as a receiver because Kelly could count on Tasker’s athleticism to make a difference on the down. You could rely on Tasker to make key special teams plays in every game, much like you can count on Popko to be one of your most consistent penalty killers (considered special teams in hockey) no matter how many of his teammates are hanging out in the penalty box.

Much like Tasker never makes it to Canton (he has made it to the list of semi-finalists several times, but the voting committee is loathe to give a spot to special teamers because they only play a “third of the game”), Popko is never going to be Player of the Week, Player of the Month, or under Hobey Baker consideration.  But heck, you don’t want to be on the penalty kill or kickoff without one of them.

(For those of you who did not grow up with a father who promoted the legend of Steve Tasker at every single meal, here is a good summary from the NFL Network.)

Maksim Mayorov (Photo: Syracuse Crunch)

Lindsay Kramer of the Syracuse Post-Standard is one of my daily must-read journalists. He is not only one of the most prolific hockey journalists in the US (he also has a regular NHL.com beat in addition to his newspaper work), but his dedication to covering minor league hockey exceeds that of many of his counterparts on NHL beats.

My favorite part of Kramer’s coverage are his Notebooks of leftover material from Syracuse Crunch games. The following was buried at the bottom of his Friday night Notebook from Syracuse’s 5-4 shootout win over San Antonio:

(Starting Crunch right wing) Maksim Mayorov’s father, Oleg, is still visiting from Moscow, although Maksim has stopped being all warm and fuzzy about it.

“I’m so tired of him already,” Max noted. “You have these problems with parents. I just want to come home, sit on the couch, relax for a couple of seconds. Sometimes he asks me some questions. But that’s OK. I think everyone has those problems.”

Isn’t this quote felt at some point in every teenager’s life?

Cameron has gathered a collection of female sports bloggers not before found in New England to begin, Beantown Athletic Supporters, a New England sports blog with snark and smart that launched this past Tuesday. I’m proud to be a part of this crew of legitimate, knowledgeable writers. They all are much better Bruins writers than I, so I’ll leave Bruins coverage to them while I cover college hockey, lacrosse and anything else I can think of.

My first piece for the site is on Blake Kessel and Sebastian Stalberg, younger brothers of Toronto Maple Leafs Phil Kessel and Viktor Stalberg and two of Hockey East’s featured players for their outstanding play last week. Read, enjoy, and visit there early and often.

And don’t worry, I’ll still be here posting when I can. The blessing of the seven years of this blog has been that it has provided me with so many other opportunities to share my love of sports with others, so I can’t ever neglect …On Being a Sports Girl for too long.

When I was a fifteen year old, there were three things in this world I obsessively saved my babysitting money for: tickets to sporting events, programs at said events, and the amazingly delicious hot-out-of-the-oven M&M cookies baked at the deli next door to my dance studio. And when you were making three dollars per hour babysitting in the Rust Belt, those three things were the only meaningful things one could save up for.

Programs were one of the reasons I would attend games and shows. When I was really young, my hands would shake nervously when I would hand over my hard-earned money for a hockey or ice show program. I would insist on getting to events right when doors opened so that I would have as much time with the program prior to the puck drop, first pitch, kickoff, or opening piece. I would devour the program the minute I sat down. I loved the smell – that toxic ink plastic-like brand new smell that graced the pages, especially if this was the beginning of the season or tour or the first one in the box. The pages would stick together upon that first read through, which made me develop this unconscious habit I still have today of flipping through the program at a rapid pace at first to separate all of the pages before settling in to fully digest the content.

Anyone who attended anything with me usually knew prior to our departure of my love of programs and the fact that they would most likely be on their own so that I could read every single word of it before the event started. I didn’t mean to be rude, but to me, reading the program was usually better than the event itself.

Somewhere around the age of thirteen, I wondered if there was any way to write just for event programs. I jumped at the chance to contribute to my school’s theater programs whenever possible, but I really wanted to write for a ice show program or hockey program. I would occasionally ask one of my creative writing teachers how one might go about writing for an event program, and they looked at me like I had five heads (which, given that I was this wanna-be sportswriter in a creative writing program filled with classmates focusing on teenage-angst filled poetry, was an everyday occurrence. In workshop, I shared fiction pieces about a klutzy female sportswriter tripping over her own feet while covering her favorite quarterback’s Pro Football Hall of Fame induction, while the rest of my class shared poems about boys breaking up with them and feeling like an outsider in such a “crazy, crazy world.”)

Fast forward nearly fifteen years, with late twenty-something me working in education, dabbling in sports blogging, and living hundreds of miles away from Rochester. My father called me one Sunday afternoon asking if I wanted to keep the Rubbermaid box of programs. He was in one of his rare cleaning moves, and he was feeling the urge to purge the crawlspace.

“Of course I do, Dad,” I answered, taken aback that anyone would ever suggest throwing my precious memorabilia out. “If you hang onto them until Christmas, I’ll bring them back to Boston with me then.”

Dad obliged and went about purging my old Girl Scout Handbooks instead (with my permission.) But his question got me thinking. I’ve found an outlet for one teenage goal, sportswriting, through the six gazillion websites I attempt to contribute to on a regular basis. However, I had never found an opportunity to work on an event program. I had to remedy this, and the opportunity was literally under my nose.

The folks in charge of coordinating the Boston University-Cornell University Red Hot Hockey rematch had moved into the offices below my own. Normally, I’m not a bold person when it comes to asking to be included on projects, but I overheard them mentioning that they were in the beginning stages of putting together the program, and I jumped on it. Pete, the creative lead, immediately gave me the chance of a lifetime – design and write both BU and Cornell’s player profiles.

I have not worked that hard on a project since my senior thesis. When Cornell was ravaged by their H1N1 outbreak and couldn’t provide us with the necessary information on deadline, I ended up researching stats and facts for the entire Cornell roster. I made drafts upon drafts, measured every pixel I could, learned options and functions in Adobe InDesign I never knew existed. Then I was allowed to write a sidebar. Then I was allowed to fact check and edit a major story.

Then, last Thursday, I walked up to my office after a series of meetings and found one of the first copies of the program waiting for me at the front desk. It smelled just like the programs I had saved up to buy as a teenager, had the same glossy cover as those programs, but when you opened to the table of contents and read the credits at the bottom, my name was listed.

I can’t even begin to describe what it felt like to read a program and see my name in the credits after a childhood spent obsessed with them. I immediately thought of my first Disney on Ice program at age four that I dragged with me everywhere for three weeks, the Buffalo Bills Gameday program I bought the only time I got to watch Steve Young play live, and the beautiful ice show programs I collected as a tweenager. Honestly, I wanted to go back in time and tell fifteen year old me what had just happened and then do a Jonathan Papelbon-esque happy jig with her. Knowing this would eventually happen would have made sitting through the boy-angst filled verse over a decade ago that much more palpable.

In sixth grade, we had to submit our drafts before our final essay was due, and thus I turned in this first draft about Edwards. Then, despite getting the go ahead to work on a final copy, I changed my topic one Sunday night while watching 60 Minutes with my Grandfather.

I would write my essay about how much I admired Andy Rooney.

Why would a twelve year old admire a curmudgeonly complaining journalist like Rooney, who I was forced to watch every week when with my Grandfather?  Because he was a journalist, and I wanted to be a journalist, and he was a complainer, and my father said I complained more than anyone he had ever met in his entire life. (That was at the time, because my brother had not been born yet, and he eventually took the complainers crown.)

Andy Rooney was paid to write, report and complain. I liked to write, I liked to report, and I liked to complain. Why hadn’t this come to me earlier in the essay writing process?

I rewrote the essay and resubmitted it. My English teacher didn’t completely understand my change of heart, but being a sixth grade teacher, probably chalked this up to me just being twelve, the world’s second most difficult age (besides 13) and gave me my A-. (I never received an A on an essay because of my horrendous spelling. I didn’t have the wonders of spellcheck because I did not have the wonders of the computer, and was one of the only kids in the class to have to hand write my assignments. I used a dictionary, but I would always miss a word or two.)

I am not as much of a complainer in my late twenties as I was as a tweenager, but I still adore and admire Andy Rooney. And in Rooney’s vein, I wish to complain about something so grating that I finally just had to put it out there:

I hate newspaper website commenters.

Take a gander on Boston.com. A pass through DemocratandChronicle.com. Select a random story, and click on “View Comments.” Read a few, but not too many, because after 3 or 4, you will want to punch your computer screen.

Newspaper website commenters all must admire Andy Rooney, because they embrace complaining, but they are more vitriol, less intelligent, and don’t have that endearing grandfather puppy-eyed look. A typical comment on a newspaper website includes many incorrect ellipses, a gratuitous use of CAPITAL LETTERS and either an ethnic slur or other negative comment towards a cultural group.

Nothing is positive in the world of newspaper website commenters. A newspaper could post a story about a rainbow rescuing a child’s cat from a tree while everyone watching received free candy, and the comments would follow as such:

“Another waste of the taxpayers money. STUPID RAINBOW UNIONS!”

“What was the child doing outside? Why did he have a pet? Where are the parents? Why do we let just ANYONE have a kid?”

“The CIA is behind that cat. OBAMA IS WATCHING US WITH ANIMALS………………..Our world is so quickly turning into 1984.”

“jkjwlankj think that cats are cute. My mom has a cat. She lives 6 twns over. I think cats are cute. Save the cats.”

“The child’s parents should be sued. They endangered the rainbow and the cat’s lives. SUE THEM NOW.”

“What if those in the crowd had nut allergies? What if they had cavities? The distribution of free candy is horribly disruptive.”

“What a waste of space………………… Why do you PRINT this NONSENSE?!?!?!?!?!?!?”

Newspaper website comments never add anything of substance to a story, because I feel that most commenters are just being contrary for the sake of being contrary. A commenter could be for a longer school day on one article, and against it in another, picking the opposing view of the article just in order to be difficult. Commenters often want to put others, be they the reporter, subject of the story or other commenters, down.

In pieces with anything having to do with children, commenters love to label each other and those within the story as horrible parents and question why a higher power allows them to procreate. In fact, newspaper commenters make such statements on pieces with nothing to do with children, like pieces on the federal government, science breakthroughs and music reviews.

The Democrat and Chronicle is especially bad when it comes to comments on stories that single out particular ethnic groups for all of the ills of society. The story could be about Wegmans raising prices, and within five minutes, there is a comment blaming fill-in-the-blank cultural group for those higher prices. The Red Wings lose a game, a business closes, a car crash happens – it is all a minority or international groups’ fault. It’s so sickeningly sad and uneducated that I can’t bring myself to read most of the comments on the site anymore. I feel for their comment moderators.

Then you have the commenters, particularly on sports sections, who say the same thing as the person before him, who said the same thing as the person before that, who said the same thing about the person before that, and so on. For example, the 61 actual comments from a June 2009 piece about Matsuzaka being taken out of the Red Sox starting pitching rotation include roughly 10 “Sayonara Dice-K”s, 10 commenters asking the exact same question (will Clay Bucholtz get the call up in his place?) and 10 commenters making the exact same comment about the “absurdity” of the World Baseball Classic.

I believe this type of absurdly annoying commenting behavior does not fester on blogs because the author of a blog post is more apt to respond in the comments, while a newspaper journalist is not apt to. A blogger has it in his or her interest to engage the commenters, creating a sense of responsibility and respect in what is posted. A newspaper journalist has other assignments, has little hand in their article being physically placed on the website, and usually does not have to physically moderate the comments. Newspaper article commenters show little respect to the subject and journalist of the article because they have no reason to believe that those people will ever see it. It is far easier to accuse and berate someone under the veil of a screenname and the distance of the Internet.

So serial newspaper commenters, I ask that you take your inner Andy Rooney down a notch, learn some notion of the word “respect” and listen to a few Grammar Girl podcasts.  Those who actually have substance to add to an article discussion are turned off by your behavior.

And with that, I’ll turn off my own Andy Rooney.

I have joined Hendrick’s Hockey as a contributor, writing about the Boston Bruins, amongst other hockey related items. Check out my first piece, “Four Must-See Bruins Games in the First Half of the Season.”

Back on the HLOG, I wrote about the Bruins off-season thus far: “The Purgatory of the T-Shirt.”

And I always am trying to update Examiner Boston on a variety of indoor lacrosse and youth lacrosse goings on. My most recent is about the end of the National Lacrosse League’s New York – Boston rivalry.

As always, I am always seeking new writing opportunities. For more information, read my “Featured In…” page.