C70: The Definitive Guide to the Cardinals Blogosphere

Daniel Shoptaw of C70 At The Bat and the founder of United Cardinal Bloggers put together the definitive guide to the Cardinals blogosphere. It is a detailed listing and description of every blog out there covering St. Louis baseball. Daniel worked hard to coordinate this guide and I think it is well worth a look for Cards fans everywhere. So, thanks to Daniel. Straight from Daniel and C70, here’s the guide.

Before the season started, Nick over at Pitchers Hit Eighth put together a wonderful post entitled 2010 Cardinal Fan’s Guide To Twitter. The post outlined what Twitter was and who was on there, broken down in to handy categories.  Which got me thinking, what if there was one of these sort of guides for all the great Cardinal blogs that are out there?

When I started blogging in 2007, there didn’t seem to be just a ton of Cardinal blogs around.  There were a few, especially a couple of big boys, but not the widespread coverage that there is today.  There are few things that I consider myself an expert on, but due to my involvement with the United Cardinal Bloggers, I feel like I’ve got at least a fairly good handle about the state of the Cardinal blogosphere today.  So that meant I felt confident that I could take this on.

Once I started sketching this out, however, I realized just how many different Cardinal blogs there really were.  Sorting them into categories and describing them was a challenge, but I hope that you’ll be able to use the following information to guide your daily reading.

A few notes before I jump into things.

First off, if a blog hasn’t been updated since the beginning of February, it’s listed as inactive.  There were a few blogs, as I was looking through my blog roll, that hadn’t updated since 2008.  My guess is if you’ve let it slide that long, chances are you aren’t picking it up.  (A side benefit of this was to be able to clean up that blog roll!)

Secondly, blogs could easily be sorted into numerous categories.  What I tried to do is put the blog in the most appropriate category and then list it in the “Also” section of the other categories it qualified for.

Thirdly, you’ll note a * by a number of these blogs.  These are blogs that are considered active members of the UCB.  What defines active is really my personal opinion, though it’s influenced by my interaction with the blogger and how often and recently they’ve participated in a UCB project.

After you go through all of these, you may be thinking, “This looks like fun.  How can I get in on this?”  Simple enough to do.  You can set up an account at Blogger or WordPress or LiveJournal or maybe even a MLBlog and start pounding away with your thoughts, opinions, and general stuff that you need to get off your chest.  The UCB is always looking for new members, so be sure to let me know when you start it up!

Finally, I wasn’t going to necessarily include my blog in this writeup, figuring that if you are hear and reading this, you probably have a general feel for what C70 At The Bat is like.  In case you are coming to here by a link from another site, however, mine would fall into the Prolific (here, Baseball Reflections, Baseball Digest and syndicated, as it were, at Seamheads) and Network categories.

Without further adieu, though, let’s get into it.

I’ll skip to the bit on Redbird Rants and am happy to be included in United Cardinal Bloggers and the guide.

Redbird Rants is part of the Fansided blog network. Ryne took it over in January after a couple of other bloggers had contributed in the past but had to let it go. Ryne is a regular poster and has been involved with some of the recent UCB projects.  It looks like he’s taken a rotating name and made it his own.

For the rest of the guide, head over to C70, you will not be disappointed.