Cuban is Squarin'

Mark Cuban has a blog. It's a weird blog at that. It attracts two groups not known for hanging around the same blog. There's the sports fan, or possibly, the Mavericks fan, who is net savvy enough to check out what the owner of Maverick's has to say.

Cuban famously blogged about NBA officiating, saying that officials should be rated and only the best ones should be allowed to officiate. For anyone that's followed tennis, especially in the 80s when McEnroe would whine how bad the officiating was, this lament sounds rather familiar. The NBA raised awareness of the blog by fining Cuban for his criticism of officiating, a no-no in NBA circles ("thou shalt not criticize the officiating").

But Cuban, being a netizen, a blogoscenti, also likes the geek stuff. He recently blogged about the pervasiveness of click fraud which he thinks is underreported. This phenomenon of getting robots to click on links to raise the amount of money a site can get (companies pay for the number of clicks there Google ads receive--thus leading to a market where fake websites with real links are set up, then clicked and clicked to earn money).

Because his comments on the geek world are interesting, and because there's enough of a geek population that likes sports, he's able to attract a diverse crowd, making his blog one of the more popular blogs out there.

I've noted this before, but happen to note this while reading an article on how Google's AdSense has caused gobs of fake webpages to go up in the name of click frauders looking to make an extra buck. This article references Cuban's blog, though as a link, not by invoking the man's name.

The average NBA watcher probably doesn't read blogs. Most sports commentators still get their information from newspapers and conventional sources, if only because the best writers tend to write for pay. Those that blog intelligently about the subject without pay must do it because they love the subject (and they won't get the inside scoop, without doing some real reporting). They don't know this side of Mark Cuban.

As I've blogged before, Cuban ought to have a competitor. Paul Allen was cofounder of Microsoft and owns the Seattle Seahawks as well as the Portland Trailblazers. However, he's kept a low profile. It's certainly possible, even a man as associated with the modern state of computer technology as Allen is, that he doesn't care about blogging or all this new fangled technology. It's easy to decide, at some point, it's not worth being cutting edge in all this, to take a break, and spend the vast sums of money building monuments to Jimi Hendrix.