Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Same site, tweaked branding

By Rick Morris

As our more observant readers might have gleaned, we've changed the name here on the site to THE FDH LOUNGE MULTIMEDIA MAGAZINE and all links on FantasyDrafthelp.com now reflect this identity. It's not really a sudden move, although the decision was fairly recent. The origins of our thought process can probably be seen as far back as February 10, when I posted a column talking about how we saw the evolution of the site at that time.

The most important part of that column as it relates to this rebranding was when I referred to the fact that, due to the technology available these days, blogs had outpaced the two-dimensional views that most people had of them. In my capacity as our Managing Partner, I said at that time that I saw this site as a full-fledged electronic magazine and that reality has only grown over time.

At the same time, I wish to point out that this change in our identity would not be possible without the state-of-the-art services provided by Blogger. It's because you can do so many things with this service these days that I think we ironically have moved past the label of "blog" -- again, in the sense of how most people view the capabilities of blogs.

However, in the technical sense of the word, we are still a blog and I am not ashamed of that title. In my capacity as a host and producer working with SportsTalkNetwork.com, I've been booking bloggers as show guests since my awareness of the blogosphere bloomed almost exactly five years ago. I've long been on the record as saying how much respect good bloggers deserve (bad bloggers are like bad performers in any line of work) and I'll never change that opinion. But with regular medium-form and long-form columns here, as well as pictures, videos, news feeds and so many great tricked-out features, again, I think we have to use the term "multimedia magazine" to get the full scope across to people.

I look very much forward to demonstrating to all of you our continuing evolution, from adding even more new voices to our awesome stable of columnists, to bringing our manic form of liveblogging to new and different events to dabbling with videoblogging to going into other areas that can only be dreamed of right now. On the verge of our 500th post here and, in a few short weeks, the one-year anniversary of this unique, all-topics corner of the Internet, I can honestly say that the best from us is yet to come.

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