Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

The NHL inches toward better fan interactivity, this time with a limited blogging section on nhl.com. You can create "pages", which are equivalent to blog entries, but there is almost no HTML allowed, making this more of a walled (non-Madison Square) garden than a true blogging environment. It's better than the eBay blogs, but not by much -- blog content doesn't appear to be visible to Google or other crawlers, and the tagging environment is largely self-referential.

I guess I'm not "getting" the half-way houses of content. Linda Cohn (ESPN on-air personality and former hockey player) laments the lack of a hockey audience. Commissioner Bettman has repeatedly said that hockey isn't an ideal TV sport, and he's been looking to electronic properties to grow the popularity of the sport both in North America and in the rest of the world that provides about a third of the NHL's talent. What better way to do this than making making the web site a true medium of the fan? Maybe we'll be critical, or loud, or flat-out wrong, but we'll be passionate, productive, and visible as well.

I'm already signed up -- and my first challenge was to find a way to get my NHL "Community Connect" zone accessible from the outside world. It's beta, it's got some rough edges, but it's still safer for armchair (left) wings than skating into the corner.