For Now...Jason Calacanis posted yesterday about the Oddjack shuttering, and I'm bugged here on a couple of levels:
One,
CardSquad isn't "doing great," it's actually doing Oddjack-sized traffic. For Weblogs, Inc to be pleased with their offering and Gawker to be scrapping theirs is frustrating. Maybe I'm being territorial here, but I feel--strongly at that--that Oddjack "works" and CardSquad doesn't. This is no offense to
Jo and
Kameelah, but they're limited by the Weblogs construct while we were given more creative freedom on OJ. They work hard at what they do, and there's value there, but it comes off as standard and safe and I get plenty of that elsewhere on the web. I firmly believe there is no such thing as "poker news," and that's a large part of the reason why the idea of reporting on the day to day mundanity of gambling needed to be turned on its ear. We didn't hit it out of the park every day, but you try coming up with thirty or so different takes on wagering on a daily basis. It's not easy. Anyway, we tried to do more than just that bullshit throw-up-a-link-and-move-on model. I know CardSquad tries too, but it's too nice about it.
Two, it's hard to get next-to-no credit for something you feel pretty proud of. I've had my name on the site for about a month, after three-and-a-half of references in passing that I was even contributing. It's a credit to the blog model and the editorial advice I got from AJ up front that even my friends were confused over what was mine and what wasn't there. Let's just say this - 99% of the poker content and all of the horse content since early July was mine. It's a collective voice, it's not truly important that I get ownership/credit for this stuff, but it does bother me that Calacanis makes a half-assed offer to bring AJ under the CardSquad banner when he admittedly knows jack-about-shit about poker, and would be horribly hamstrung by their vanilla voice. I brought credibility to the poker content at Oddjack, not because I carry a big poker blogging name, but because I gave a fuck about the content. I'll have more to say on this another day, but it's a credit to AJ's editorial direction and the blog's "collective we" voice that he gets singled out as a guy who might get some interest from CardSquad. It's personally frustrating to see AJ and AJ alone get the credit on this. His guidance has been invaluable, and I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to work with him on this endeavor, but most of this poker shit was mine. I've never been good with not getting credit for what I've been responsible for.
I'll have more to say about this after I'm done with OJ end of next week. It's been a good experience for me, and I'm happy I've done it. But I've got some shit I want to say about all of this too, and I don't really feel like kicking the dog while it's down. We'll work out the next week and a half, and then I'll jump into talking more at length about this. I'm okay with the Oddjack gig rolling to a close, but there are a few mistakes and beefs that I'll address here soon. Until then, enjoy your turkey tomorrow...