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Fox Sports: "Zach Arnold's Fight Opinion site is one of the best spots on the Web for thought-provoking MMA pieces."

« | Home | »

Second anniversary of Fight Opinion

By Zach Arnold | December 25, 2007

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If you have not listened to our Christmas 2007 special radio show, go listen to it now. Feel free to post any comments about the show here at this post after you listen to it.

While the world is celebrating Christmas today, we’re not only celebrating the holiday but we’re also celebrating the second anniversary of the launch of Fight Opinion.

If you want an abbreviated version of how the site was launched and what our initial goals were, click here.

Upon reflection about what our site has accomplished so far, my proudest accomplishment has been the creation of the new site layout. It required a lot of elbow grease and assistance from some very smart individuals, but the final product was well worth the wait.

I’ve always been an independent writer and I am happy with many of the articles I’ve written about both pro-wrestling and MMA over the years. However, I was never interested in being a content king. Sure, I like contributing news and information that other sites might not. With that stated, I always felt that it was an impossible task to compete against so many different web sites. It’s a numbers game, and rather than compete against everyone else in the MMA media, I decided to try to build a site that would network everyone together.

It’s not necessarily a conventional philosophy, but I feel that Fight Opinion is growing in importance because we’ve embraced a structure that promotes content on other sites. I like the fact that the site updates itself automatically. There are a lot of great writers who cover MMA on independently-owned sites, who do not belong to large media conglomerates. When Fight Opinion started two years ago, the user-generated MMA media scene online was completely empty. You had old-timers like Eddie Goldman, Sherdog, and The Underground Forum, but there was no real MMA blogsophere. There were few audio podcasts (outside of The Fightworks Podcast).

To see how fast independent MMA media has grown in the last two years is incredible. I can’t explain in words how remarkable the transformation has been and how much bigger the transformation will be as years pass on.

I want to thank a lot of people who have helped me out over these last two years with the development of the web site. Just on the radio side alone, we’ve had great people like Rob Sayers, Luke Nicholson, Erin Bucknell, Caleb (from MMA Predictions), and Jeff Thaler who have helped out in a big way. On the writing side of the equation, we’ve had so many international writers who have contributed content (from Adam Swift to Jeff Comstock to Mark Pickering to Adam Morgan to Tetsuya Sano to the great Tomer Chen). A lot of writers have come and gone through the doors of Fight Opinion in the last two years and I expect that we will see plenty of talent join the ranks of John Philapavage and Iain Liddle soon on this site.

Forward thinking

I want to create a video section on our web site. No, not us hosting multimedia clips necessarily, but rather linking and embedding code from sites like YouTube (both the English and Japanese versions) that contain a boatload of MMA clips. You could spend weeks, if not months surfing through all the MMA-related content on YouTube alone.

So, I want some advice from you as to how I should structure a video section on our web site. Should we structure it similar to a file folder (where you have a static page to view videos of Shooto, Pancrase, K-1, etc. by category) or would you prefer pages that contain certain themes (i.e. Japanese MMA – Biggest matches of 1990s, Biggest Japanese MMA grudge fights, etc.)

Let me know what you kind of structure I should use, as I would like to build on the videos section soon and add some content that will keep readers on our web site for an extended period of time.

Topics: Media, MMA, Zach Arnold | 14 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |

14 Responses to “Second anniversary of Fight Opinion”

  1. robnashville says:

    You starting up the FO site was mana from heaven for me… I didn’t have to slog through all the Japanese wrestling stuff back at your old Poru Power site or listen to one of those 3 and a half hour audio shows trying to glean a few MMA bits. My interest and MMA IQ has expanded exponentially thanks to this site…… congrats on the anniversary.

    Your site has become something of a Kingmaker, any non-mainstream MMA site ie blog that i have visited has mainly been because it has been touted here

  2. John Griffin says:

    Thanks for the hard work over the last couple of years. I really enjoyed the blow out mega xmas show!

  3. Matt says:

    Hell of a site you’ve got here, congratulations and keep up the good work.

  4. Andy says:

    Cheers for all the hard work mate – well worth it 🙂

  5. ttt says:

    good work, even when you guys mire in negativity, it’s always based on facts

  6. klown says:

    Zach and the FO crew, I love the site, thanks for all the work you put in.

  7. rshmn says:

    2 lightning fast years 🙂 Thanks guys :]

  8. liger05 says:

    great site. A real great partner to puroresupower.com. Zach I do love fight opinion radio but I do miss the old Puro radio shows!!!

    Oh and with the videos make sure UWFI is added.

  9. Happy anniversary Fight Opinion!

  10. catch says:

    I love this site, I’ve been a fan since hearing your segments on Smart Wrestling fan. Thanks for all the work you put into it, and merry christmas.

  11. Marcus says:

    Zach, thanks for all the work you’ve done. It’s great to read news about the overseas mma orgs anywhere from two days to a week before it’s on the major MMA sites.

  12. Ok, listened to the show, and it was great, as good or better than advertised.

    Comments follow:

    1. Ludlow is just barely east of Springfield, it’s sort of in the middle of the woods and many people from eastern Massachusetts might suggest that it’s probably somewhere in New York, or that it might as well be since it’s so far west of 495. Then again, I grew up on the North Shore, and I maybe heard the name of the town that I now live in two or three times in my first 20 years of life…some areas of the state are remarkably self-contained.

    Ludlow is one of them. It’s like little Portugal/Brazil. It’s a great place to go to see a soccer game, you can get your bifanas etc hot and tasty. If the US Open Cup makes the rounds to Ludlow next year (sometimes the Revs play their home game out there), then I suggest you attend, because it’s a good time.

    The entire kind of western corridor from Boston out is an area well settled by Luso-americans and just straight up Lusos. I live close to Framingham, and you can hear Portuguese being spoken on the street corners on a regular basis, as long as it’s not freaking cold out, which it is.

    It’s nothing new though, the Lusos been comin’ here for years (as Bono would say). Some of the most storied soccer teams of the 30s and 40s were largely stocked with immigrants and the children of immigrants from Portugal. Being a state that’s on the ocean, we had a massive fishing industry and whaling too. That industry brought a lot of Portuguese to the state as immigrants. Gloucester and other historic towns used to be awash with houses in orange and green (now they’re all white with black shutters by zoning regulation), and still carry some historic festivals such as the blessing of the boats that reflect that immigrant tradition.

    The same is true of Rhode Island. New York style clam chowder? Came from Rhode Island, invented by Portuguese.

    New Yorkers, can’t trust them to tell you the truth about anything.

    Anyway, I don’t think they would open another gym so close to Links. Framingham might be a good choice if they were really interested in coming out here. That would be the third major school in the state (assuming you count Links, which really only has one high profile fighter).

    2. Bas…dude, is this guy on cocaine? Maybe bennies? He needs to switch to freaking decaf.

  13. The Gaijin says:

    Congrats Zach!

    I’d like to say I think of myself as having “been here since the beginning”. Mainly a lurker at first and a sporadic poster since then – love the site, keep up the great work. Easily the first site I go to when I log-on every morning.

    Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays to those of you who prefer) to everyone here who makes this such an enjoyable
    “community” to be a part of…

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