After claiming our sixth Ballhype Golden Picks contest victory last week, we offered up our spoils, a free Ballhype t-shirt, to any site member who posted their user name, their favorite team, and their reason why they best deserved to wear the Blue and Orange colors of the Web's hottest social network centered around sports.

We had four entries, from "dharr18", "McLovin", "Alan1066", and "Jason", the site's co-founder.

With the midnight September 1 deadline having passed, it was time to pick a winner!

Step 1: Create The Name Cards

I took some nearby construction paper (ooh, pink - pretty!) and wrote the names of the four entrants in equal sized squares (as pictured below).


The Four Entrants: Click for Larger Image

Step 2: Add Some Incentive to the Judge

As I already promised I wouldn't make the selection, I got four pieces of dog kibble, and assigned one piece each to the four entrants (as pictured below). As our aging hound is still scent-oriented and food mad, this made sense.


Four Small Treats: Click for Larger Image

Step 3: The Selection Process

Kristine took Molly, the beagle, out of the room, while I took the four squares and placed them on the floor, hiding the pieces of kibble. The squares were placed in equidistant areas from where Molly would be emerging, as to not curry favor with one over another.

Step 4: Molly Picks a Winner

With the squares in place, Molly darted out, but first headed to her food dish. Finding nothing, she came back to the living room, and ran by "McLovin"'s square, and missed it entirely. We saw her then sniff at the "Dharr18" square, and turn away, eventually heading to "Alan1066", turning it over and eating the kibble. A winner! Or so we thought... we then looked back and found the "Dharr18" square was missing its kibble. Somehow, she had eaten it without moving the square, and in fact, "Dharr18" was our winner! You can see Molly at Alan1066's square, with a little pink showing below.


Our Humble Judge: Click for Larger Image

Should we get the opportunity to win again sometime, a less likely event with baseball giving way to college football, I'd like to offer this contest again, just maybe with some more entrants. So congratulations to Dharr18. Erin should be in touch with you shortly to claim your prize! We hope to also soon see you win the Golden Picks contest legitimately in the near future!

In the spirit of Webomatica's occasional summaries, I thought it'd make sense to recap how louisgray.com is doing on a monthly basis. With any regularity, we might find some interesting trends (or not...)

August 2007 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published: 944

Total stories published in August: 38 (Just over 1 per day)
Total stories with comments: 16 (42% of all stories)
Total comments on August posts: 40 (Just over 1 per post, 2.5 per commented post)

Technorati Authority Ranking: 117
Feedburner Peak in Month: 103 subscribers
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 13 subscribers
MyBlogLog Members: 29

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12: 2nd (Behind only April)

Blog Value Estimator: $60,970.32

Top Five Most Visited August Stories (According to Summary)

1. iPhones Aplenty In Silicon Valley Geek Mecca
2. Attention Newbies: Not All Apple News Changes the World
3. Bourne Ultimatum Delivers, Has Me Wishing for More
4. Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage
5. New Reality: Your Blog Is Your Brand

Others receiving votes: Top Ten Favorite A's Players: August, Fake Steve Jumps the Shark, What is the Future of MyBlogLog?

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Summary)

1. Soft-Core Porn, Sex Themes Power Google Video
2. Watch Every Episode of The Simpsons Online - Free
3. Google Video Still Peddling Soft-Core Porn Smut
4. BitTorrent Bails Me Out on TiVo's Simpsons Miss
5. Addicting Games Sure to Reduce Productivity

I can't overstate the amount of traffic delivered from the top three stories here. No matter the time of day, or day of the week, I get surfers looking for a quick porn fix, from around the world. My notes on Google Video have driven all sorts of X-rated keywords to my site. These porn seekers also drove traffic to my topical label pages for Technology, YouTube, and Video in a big way.

There was also quite the bump in Simpsons fans traffic around the movie. Unfortunately, I didn't have a copy of the movie they could download.

In August, we had some good traffic, and some good conversations. Due to time constraints, I didn't post as often as I could, and I hope to post more in the coming months. I look forward to delivering a strong September and getting more engaged with you readers.

With the A's falling out of contention, our local sports focus just may gradually move toward that of our California Golden Bears football squad, who kicks off the 2007 season today, in a much-awaited, nationally discussed, game against the Tennessee Volunteers.

For the third consecutive season, Kristine and I have season tickets, and will be donning the blue and gold, pumping our fists in the air along with Oski, yelling "Cal Band Great!" and telling everybody around us who cares to listen how much we hate Stanford, regaling them with tales of victory and defeat from the decade gone by - even as my own memories become less and less relevant to today's students and fans. After all, it was 10 years ago that I was entering my junior year at Cal, and 12 years ago that I first started attending classes at UC Berkeley. That means some of this year's freshmen were in first grade when I was attending my first political science 1 lectures. Scary.

Cal, largely expected to challenge the national leaders in football last season, opened with a dud of a game against Tennessee, a 35-18 flop that put their season in dire straights early on, reducing expectations. Eager to avoid a similar fate for the second consecutive year, the university has called on fans to swarm en masse to Memorial Stadium today and overwhelm the Tennessee squad and its fans with sheer noise, in hope of contributing to victory. In fact, early reports say the school will distribute no fewer than 50,000 megaphones for fans to pierce the eardrums of the hated Volunteers, when they are on offense.

We're excited to get it started. We're ready to revisit "The Play" from 1982. We're ready to debate AP Top 25 and BCS Rankings again. And despite the A's quasi-dramatic win last night, we're almost ready to focus elsewhere. Unlike last season, when we would see both the A's and the Bears on the same day, we've already sold our baseball tickets and are headed straight to Cal.

Follow along at Sports Blog Nation site The Band Is Out On the Field and wish us luck! Go Bears!

Last week, for some reason, my combination of frequent game picks, combined with a slant toward underdogs and dumb luck, led me to my second consecutive Ballhype Game Picks win (my sixth overall). Now that both my wife and I have Ballhype t-shirts, as well as three of my colleagues, I'm thinking it's time to extend the opportunity to be clad in the colors of one of the most exciting Web communities to debut in 2007 - to you.

To earn the Ballhype t-shirt, I ask only you comment to this post, and list:

1. Your login at Ballhype.com (or create one).
2. Your favorite sports team (any sport, any level).
3. Why you best deserve the t-shirt.

It's that simple. Assuming we have more than one respondent, the rules are:

You must respond by Midnight PDT, September 1st
Ballhype management will ship in USA only

I will put your names on paper and have them selected randomly by a member of the Gray household who is not me (a.k.a. the wife or the beagle). Take a look at the Ballhype T-shirts available, and see what you could win!

Good luck!