CLEVELAND, OHIO (TheOBR.com) – Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
THE DAILY BLOVIATION
So there’s this basketball player who used to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers, took his talents to Miami, returned to Cleveland, left for Los Angeles, and now is the center of discussion as to where he goes next. Unless he wants to play tight end for the Cleveland Browns (which I’m guessing he could have in his younger days), it’s not really relevant to me.
Many of you, I know, are fans of multiple teams in multiple sports, but I quite honestly don’t have the time for NBA and MLB anymore. I follow my Buckeyes religiously in football, but when it comes to other sports, I’m mostly so busy with the OBR that I don’t have time to sit and watch the games. I’ve bordered on a one-sport guy for a while now, and I’m not crazy about it.
This would have come as a surprise to those people who knew me well in my younger days, when the then-Indians were at the top of my sports pantheon. I would fanatically devour every game, and the Indians’ advancement to the World Series in 1995 was the highlight of my fan career to that point.
But when the Browns moved and a switch flipped in my brain, the return of the Cleveland Browns and its subsequent chronicling became my primary focus.
Regardless, all the endless sports radio talk and hubbub about whether LeBron James will be headed back to Cleveland has yielded at least one gem that resonates with me, namely, Brian Windhorst’s aggravation with news aggregators, which led him to say, “Aggregation is a blight on the business and re-aggregation of bad aggregation is a blight on society.”
Windhorst’s observation comes from experience, as anything he says about James is instantly plucked out of the air and turned into a Xitter link or aggregated story.
Indeed. I would put it at the center of the sports media misery machine, sucking the life out of original content creators, mangling facts, and generally overwhelming the system with so much recycled crap that it’s difficult to find anything that has any merit. Handing these people AI to increase output or decrease effort could be the final straw.
Now, of course, I frequently vent about how aggregators, plentiful in the Browns space, are leeches competing with each other for clicks. In fact, they’re so desperate to regurgitate anything of possible interest that they treat radio blowhards and YouTubers spewing silliness for attention as “analysts” and “insiders”.
Which bin does this belong in? (Photo: Unsplash)
This, of course, is an ideal sequel to yesterday’s Newswire, where I spent too much of my one precious lifespan discussing the Browns News-Aggregration Industrial Complex. Yes, I misspelled “aggregation” in the acronym yesterday because my typing fingers were apparently trying to create their own content vertical. That is how the machine gets you. First, you mock it, then you become part of the typo economy. Then AI swoops in, misinterprets the typo as a new word, and spews it through the universe.
What I will say is that I’ve thought long and hard about my own dabbling in aggregation throughout the years, which has reached a form in this Massive Morning Missive that circles back on itself and eats its own tail, referencing other Browns stories and commenting on them, while at the same time providing meta-analysis of the media machine itself.
I’ve messed around with aggregation in the past, mostly because I want the OBR to be a place where fans can always find the very latest news. I’ve done newswires and tried other automated ways to present news from around the web via the site, which has run into a roadblock over the last 10-15 years because I’ve been stuck on platforms I can’t hack. I’m like a salamander unable to regrow its own limb.
I guess the difference between that and what I see elsewhere in the media is that we have certain standards for what counts as worth talking about. I don’t care what some guy on the radio says, for the most part, because they’re generally clueless. I don’t care who was snubbed on which list by some analyst I’ve never heard of. I might reference such things here, generally mockingly, but they sure as heck don’t deserve their own article.
So, I’m always struggling with how to make the OBR reflect the latest news of interest to Browns fans without turning it into a waste recycling center.
I think I might have found a solution that I can implement in a couple of months. I can’t wait to show it to you.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
OBR GOODIES
OBR VIDEO
OBR ARTICLES
FROM THE FORUMS
THE LIFT
Positive news from the world of sports and beyond…
A Quebec firm, Dundee Sustainable Technologies, has developed a generally non-toxic gold-extraction process that avoids cyanide and also uses its GlassLock process to isolate arsenic into inert glass. In one Freegold Ventures test cited by GNN, the process recovered 95% of the gold while isolating 98% of the arsenic as inert glass. As these metals become more critical to our high-tech economy, coming up with cleaner and more environmentally friendly ways to extract them will be critical. Progress. From Canada. Progress.
WRAPPING UP
When not trying to determine whether the internet is reporting news or merely photocopying a photocopy of a rumor someone left in the break room, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
CONTACT Barry to sponsor the OBR. We have plans for nearly any budget!
If you have made it this far, you must subscribe to the OBR. Them’s the rules.