When I first heard about NHL Connect, I thought to myself, "Wow! What a great idea!" Just think, if you were trying to develop content for your website, what better way than to have someone else do the work for you. For free even.

There are quite a few very good bloggers out there and some very good blogs dedicated to hockey. So rather than let some other site - not to pick on MVN, but say for example MVN - reap the benefits of that talent, why not find a way to harvest it for your own site.

Unfortunately, it's not worked out that way. For one thing, fan blogs, while there are not really promoted on the website. If you go to Blog Central, there is a place to join NHL Connect, but it's the professional blogs that are all being promoted. Down -- way down -- at the bottom of the page is an area that says "recently updated". If you're lucky, that area was recently updated. Sometimes I look and was last recently updated four or five days ago.

From there, you can click on more, Which takes you to the NHL Connect Page which is sometimes updated as well, but not always.

I dunno, maybe there's not that much traffic on NHL Connect, but if you look at Live Journal, Vox, Xanga or any of the others, the recently updated is sometimes moving so fast you can't get to them all.

There are groups -- the ones that I belong to don't seem to get a lot of traffic. It also shows a selection of members, but if you click on the link that says "show all members", you get...nada. Ditto if you try this from a friend's page where it says "show all friends". Nothing. Zip. A blank page.

So it's virtually impossible to browse for other, perhaps more interesting people than the first 10 members to have joined the group.

The posting interface is not very good. You actually have to force line breaks in between paragraphs using html, otherwise, it runs everything together and you get very long run to together posts that are hard to read. Yes, it's possible to do a good looking post, you just have to work at it. Most people aren't interested in that kind of effort.

There really is no way to customize the look and feel of your page either, not to the extent with myspace, livejournal, xanga and various other blogging and/or social network services. That's wouldn't be so much a big deal if everything else worked right, but it doesn't.

Snapshots -- my initial reaction being "Why bother?" It would be great if you could take your camera into games, but my 20-something year old Nikon with a detattachable lense is considered a "Professional" camera and those are not allowed in the arenas -- at least, not in the NHL arenas around here. Neither are camera bags. No matter that people can take in diaper bags that are bigger, camera bags are BAAAAADDDDDDD!

Fine, you can take snapshots with your cellphone, but generally speaking they're not going to produce high quality game photos. Oh yeah, I know. We can't do that because people might sell their photos -- I know that it's happened -- but it's pretty darn sad of course when one person has to spoil it for the rest of the people.

I don't sell my photos, but have been known to send them over to players parents - especiall the folks of the rookies - who get a real blast out of having nice shots of their son playing in the NHL. No more though.

It is of course, part of the alienation of the players from the fans. No taking pictures, no hanging around getting autographs...I mean it used to be you could get an autograph by hanging around the back gate at the old Miami Arena. The new Panthers digs in Sunrise have security tighter than Fort Knox.

They've gotten away from selling the sport by letting the players be ambassidors.

I personally would rather attend a minor league game. The seats are cheaper, you get to sit closer to the ice, they don't care you if you bring a camera in, and the players are more than happy to sign autographs after the game. What fun! And what a concept.

Then again, given the number of minor league teams that start up and fold each year, maybe that concept doesn't work. Familiarity breeds contempt or something. We need to have untouchable super-human heros to look up to.

How much better the world would be if we didn't know about steroids and gambling and everything else that is reported about sports heros these days?

But going back to NHL connect...when you upload a snapshot, it resizes it, which means if your posting a photo smaller than the 640 x whatever size that it wants to resize it to, you get some really grainy results or some really out and out major distortion. If you don't believe me, open up some of the shots in Wild and Crazy Photos. Nice, huh?

What's the purpose, except to make everyone's photos look bad?

I also dislike having "The Boards" be your blog and having that on the same page as your photos. If someone has uploaded a lot of photos, it then takes forever for their page to load. Granted you can add a private "group" and put your photos there or use it for your blog, but then nothing shows up on your main page unless you manually add a link.

Color me crabby, but on the whole I'm not really blown away by the whole NHL Connect experience.

Granted, it's a little better than the paid MLBlogs which are so well hidden they're viturally impossible to find. Again, another good idea gone rotten.

Ah well...what's one to do? I was kind of hoping to use NHL Connect as my hockey blog since I feel like I should separate the hockey blog from the baseball blog but then I also sometimes feel like I shouldn't.

I feel like posting about hockey kind of weirds out the baseball people, but then I also get someone like Tyler, who says "What are you going to do without baseball?" But then I feel the same way about posting book reviews to my blog or just blogging about life in general and then I end up with half a dozen blogs and I don't have time for them all.

At least I feel little or no urge to blog about football. Blogging about the Dolphins would be...well...depressing.

Back to the drawing board I guess. Then again I'm not overwhelmed by myspace, vox or Live Journal either. And don't get me started on Yahoo 360. Although some of the services have nice features that I'd like to see incorporated into the other services, I figure it's like my two drugstore habit. I just can't get everything I want in one.

I'm still happiest with Xanga, maybe because I've used it the longest and am used to it.