ALA: Best Free Reference Web Sites 2009
Posted by Sean Forman on June 12, 2009
Thank you to the American Library Association for this recognition. We always feel good when pros who use the sites day-in day-out recognize the site and useful to them.
Posted by Sean Forman on June 12, 2009
Thank you to the American Library Association for this recognition. We always feel good when pros who use the sites day-in day-out recognize the site and useful to them.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:33 am
free website, yes, as in "I don't have to pay money," but not free of Cialis advertisements taking up 1/3 of the front page. i don't mind advertising, but can we please restrict the products to non-adult viewing? this website should be available to families without having to encounter erection-related content.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Congratulations on the recognition. I would, however, echo the previous comment about inappropriate ads, although, in fairness, I hadn't noticed it until the remark.
One of my favorite websites, otherwise!
June 12th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
and congratulations. this site has been in my top-five for five years running. keep up the awesome work.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Another well-deserved kudo for this great site!
As to the Calais ad, if your kids are old enough to understand what "erectile dysfunction" is, then perhaps you should talk to them about it. After all, they will encounter ads for Calais and similar products on many "non-adult" Websites, on TV (incessantly), and in most popular print magazines. It's nearly impossible to avoid them, so you might as well be honest and up front with your kids. Calais itself is a doctor-prescribed medication for a legitimate health-related concern; like Zocor for high cholesterol. The ad on this site itself is not suggestive in any way or has any inappropriate or suggestive pictures.
If, on the other hand, you kids are too young to understand what ED is, you can simply say that it is a meddical condition that some adults have that is sometimes treatable with medication, like high blood pressure or diabetes, and leave it at that. If they ask more (but they probably won't - most young kids aren't interested in "old people problems"), you can say that you'll explain it to them in more detail when they're older and understand more about how the human body works. You can also tell them that this is something that they won't have to worry about for a very long time, if ever.
Finally, with regard to the size of the ad, it only takes up about 1/10th of the rightmost column, about 1/30th (~3%) of the front page by my estimation. I've seen far bigger ads for such products in many print media.
June 12th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
How about using some sort of AdBlock? I use Firefox with the AdBlock Plus plugin. No ads for me...ever.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Yeah...I never see ads on this site or any other. Use Firefox + Adblock Plus. Of course, then I guess B-R won't make any revenue from selling ads if everybody is blocking them.
June 13th, 2009 at 5:53 am
That's true, we would in fact shut down pretty quickly if everyone did that. Our server costs alone are $5,000/month.
June 13th, 2009 at 9:24 am
I've been coming here since right after it opened (when was that?) and have a link to it, along with 20 others, on my Yahoo home page. It's awesome. As for the ads, I don't really see them and also don't have children (so that might be why). I remember the day when the only full league stats you could get were in the Sunday newspaper and there wasn't much (hits, rbi, hrs, avg) so when I first came across BBR it was like running into a gold mine. Does anyone remember the yearly Baseball Record with teh red cover?
June 14th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
I remember back when the Philadelphia Inquirer posted team-by-team player stats on Tuesdays (NL) and Wednesdays (AL), complete through Sunday’s games. They were limited to just the basics, but they included every player on each team’s active roster. Our fantasy league’s updates (done by hand on a spreadsheet back then) were compiled on Wednesday and we’d get them some time on Thursday – halfway into the next week’s games. Sometimes we’d run into problems if a player was removed from a team’s active roster during the week (DL, demotion, etc.) but had played some games before being de-activated. The Inky wouldn’t always list that player’s stats. While the league statistician tried to catch these omissions, he had a “real job”, and couldn’t spend too many hours scouring the box scores; you had to double-check on your own if you wanted to be sure.
Then, when USA Today’s Baseball Weekly was first introduced (~1990?), you could get more complete stats on Monday – if you were lucky enough to have a newsstand that carried it or lived close enough to the printer to get next-day mail delivery. (Yes, in the early days of BW subscriptions were sent by snail-mail! Sometimes you were lucky if it wasn’t totally tattered by the time it got to your mailbox.)
Surely that is one of the great contributions of the Internet; not only can we get next-day updated stats (and the greatest archive ever), but we can also get auto-generated league stats done through several internet-based stat services, and we can even follow all the games live on mlb.com, gameday, or gamecast. Not to mention the use of wonderful forums like this one, blogs, tweets, and other fan-to-fan tools.
Times have sure changed…
June 14th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Yup, I remember when we were paying $50+ per team to get weekly Rotisserie stats sent 4-5 days out of date. Now we get up-to-date stats for free.
June 15th, 2009 at 7:54 am
The Philly Inquirer was my hometown paper growing up, and I had no idea how lucky I was. The weekly stats with all players was something I was used to.
June 15th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I'm a librarian, and, while I have no real job reason for being here, I'm on this site several times a day.