What's Buzzin' in the Blogsphere

In the Qatar Open, Belgian Justine Henin defeated fifth seed Patty Schnyder to get into the semi-final against Jelena Jankovic of Serbia. Daniela Hantuchova of Slovakia defeated third seed Martina Hingis to get into the semi-final against Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia.

In the Dubai Open, Roger Federer of Switzerland defeated Serbia's Novak Djokovic to reach the semi-finals, where he will face Tommy Haas of Germany.

It looks like Mario Ancic will be out of action for a long time because of mononucleosis.

Dan's post, Brand Ambition, at No Man's Land, is interesting. He quotes from an artcile on TheBrandingChannel.com.

...despite some very good sub-sites with strong imagery and material, things go a little bit awry for Wilson on the web, thanks to the pages loading as slowly as a tennis serve from a 5-year-old, and content quality that fluctuates like the emotions of the Williams sisters.

...For web surfers who actually take the time to persevere with Wilson.com, there are some rewards: free poster downloads of Wilson-sponsored sports personalities and some decent animated content to spice up the experience, including a video of an official Super Bowl game ball being constructed. (Wilson has made footballs for the NFL since 1941.) Be warned, however, that anyone venturing too deep within the site will have as much fun getting home as a baseball player trying to score while the catcher's holding the ball securely in his mitt—none of the Wilson sub-sites open in a new window. This makes cross-navigation impossible and can wear out the patience of a user who has to consistently click the "back" button.

I myself have no opinion on much of this, but I have noticed a similar phenomenon in many of the Old Guard industries. Like the media, the publishing industry, the automakers. I suppose that making piles of money got to be too easy. They seem to think that they're so inherently superior to the competition that they don't have to try just as hard to please the customer and plan for the future. They seem not to take challenges seriously. Take the auto industry. They ignore the writing on the wall and continue to make mostly nothing but gas guzzlers till they're out of room to park all those unsellable vehicles pouring off the lines, weeks after sales have crashed because the cost of oil skyrocketed. Do they all have golden parachutes, or what? The same thing happened in the dead-tree media when the price of paper suddenly wasn't cheap anymore. And the media have barely begun to admit that their competition from electronic publication is not beneath their notice.

You go to these websites, and you wonder what they are thinking. TENNIS Magazine, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX NEWS, do you have any idea how long it takes your freakin' web pages to load over a phone line? Do you have any idea how many visitors you aggravate and lose because of that?

That's the first thing every amateur learns by Googling "How to make my first web page 101" - Don't PO your visitors with pages that take a half hour to load.

And then, when the first thing they see is a ton of image ads and even video ads - when they see that a bushel of this bandwidth hogging advertising is what the long wait is for - they are really ticked off. Not good for business.

A player to watch is Czech player Lucie Safarova, the current featured player of the month at OnTheLine.org.

I really liked this golden oldie by Peter Bodo published while he is on vacation. There's a lot of misplaced sympathy in this world. And I agree with him 100% on this. Cheaters are cheaters. They hurt others. It is the others who deserve our sympathy, not the cheaters. Just because they whine and put on such an angel-face and are so sad when they get caught (sniff, sniff).

I always get a kick out of the shorts at Off the Baseline. Read about Roger's tweener, among other things, today. (See it on video too.)

And at the Tennis Diary, we get some insight into the the game Amelie Maurismo. It seems another case of function fitting form, rather than the other way around.

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