Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Curling.ca Revamped


















The Canadian Curling Association has a revamped website.

As first glance will tell you, it is now very, very busy... some may even complain it almost overwhelms the senses. But if the mission is to bombard the viewer with as much curling content as possible, they have succeeded, and all that remains is to see if they can maintain the intensity throughout this critical pre-Olympic curling season.

Speaking of the critical pre-Olympic curling season, the oft-maligned CTRS Trials process has its own button, with no less than five descriptive sub-pages. Will this effort finally halt the quizzical stares shared coast to coast... or will they actually increase?

Of interest is the current top news story, scalped from yesterday’s St. John’s Telegram – with full credit, of course. There was a day when the only “news” fit to appear on curling.ca was that of the org’s own news releases. Could this story, which highlights a Canadian team’s upcoming appearance in a clearly non-CCA event halfway around the world, signal a new era of news dissemination?

Of great interest is the new commitment, by staff, to the blogosphere. Warren Hansen’s The Last End, a fixture in CCA publications since the days of black-and-white printing presses, is now online, as are blogs from National Development Coach Paul Webster, located here, and Event and Curling Club Development man Danny Lamoureux, located here.

Will The Boss eventually have a blog?

And we guess we won’t be, er, borrowing any CCA talent for blogposts here at The Curling News, eh?

We also note a tighter relationship between this relaunched site and that of the Season of Champions event site, which leads off with a much bigger splash for their Canadian-hosted events.

All in all, a solid revamp of what is still, after all these years, an important site for the promotion of the sport. After all, the CCA website still comes up No. 1 on a Google search of “curling”, ahead of – in order – Wikipedia, the TSN curling page, the horrible, awful dog’s breakfast which is, sadly, curling.com (no link provided) and even the World Curling Federation.


Elsewhere:

revRecluse continues to unearth – and play with – great curling board games from days gone by. His latest is a glorious Hubley from the 1960s, featuring a delicious concave playing surface ...

• The Bismark Summer Spiel featured a wheelchair curling team for the first time, and there’s video here ...

• Finally, this doesn’t read merely “irreverent” to us. In fact, this sure reads like a rip. Curling compared to... competitive eating? If you agree with our sourness and wish to direct some venom, do so to Flairview Travel Pty Ltd., 680 George Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000. Telephone is either (02) 8263 5100 or +612.82635151, we can’t tell which. Perhaps SuperBacon can find us an email address? ...

3 comments:

SongMonk said...

Are you ripping on competitive eating???

- Fan of Competitive Eating

TCN said...

Oh heavens. We can't even rip Competitive Eating anymore?!

So be it... apologies and good luck consuming-on-demand, SongMonk!

TCN

SongMonk said...

I'm just kidding around. I am a curling fan first and a competitive eating fan somewhere down the list. :-)