Beyond the Rhetoric

As I promised yesterday, here is the announcement of the new hockey blog to be run by Ed Lau and me.

After careful consideration of all the candidates — there were over 300 in all — we have decided to go with SlapShotSquad.com, a name that was suggested by Braden Graham. Don’t bother going there just yet, because there’s nothing there… we hope to have the site up and running by the time the 2007-08 NHL hockey season begins in a couple of weeks.

As you may recall, we held an iPod contest last month to help gather some domain suggestions. The first thank you to those who participated was given out at the beginning of this month when we held a random draw for a blue 4GB iPod nano. That prize was awarded to Jessica Yu and it should be in transit to her home as we speak.

The bigger prize, of course, was the black 8GB iPod nano and this was going to be given to the person who suggested the absolute best dot com domain for our new hockey blog. There were quite a few interesting entries in there, ranging from the serious to the hilarious. Some went with a “love for the game” approach and suggested names like NationalPassion.com and TrueHockeyFans.com. Others decided to go with something funnier, providing various plays on the word “puck.” One of the best — that we ultimately cannot use for obvious reasons — is PuckBuddies.com. And no, we’re not going with EdAndMichaelsHockeyBlog.com, as the panda-slaying John Chow recommended.

We’d love to provide some glorious link love back to Braden Graham for giving us such a kick ass hockey blog name, but he doesn’t have a blog. In any case, thanks Braden for suggesting the domain. Please email us with your mailing address so that we can get that 8GB iPod nano your way. Plenty of portable music awaits you.

Ed and I would like to extend one last thank you to everyone who participated in our contest. Without you, we may have gone with a pretty stupid name and ended up being the laughing stock of the hockey blog world… Nah, that couldn’t happen. Between my freelance writing skills and Ed’s ability to be awesome at all times, we’re bound for success, right?

I’ll be sure to make some sort of formal announcement on Beyond the Rhetoric when SlapShotSquad.com officially launches. Oh, and do let us know if you’d be interested in a hockey pool with prizes.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m proud to announce that — as predicted — Beyond the Rhetoric has cracked the 150 RSS subscriber mark. According to the widget today (which reflects yesterday’s stats), BTR is rocking the world of 153 readers. Sweet.

Filed under Sports and Games.