You may have noticed the rash of logos at the bottom of every post that started appearing a few months ago, all devoted to social media and the Web 2.0 and everything else that occasionally distracts journalists from the dying newspaper business. (Be lucky you don't live in D.C., home of the fifteen front page stories about Facebook.) About the time those popped up, SB Nation made a big push to get all of their bloggers on Twitter, with contests to see who could get the most followers, and general brave leap into yet another online medium.

I stayed as far away from that as possible.

Once the hoopla died down however, I did poke around Twitter for a bit, as the software guys have done some nifty incorporation between it and the blogging platform; I grabbed an account, followed some people, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

I still don't know what I want to do with it, but I quickly decided I didn't want it to be a glorified RSS feed, which are particularly boring. Nor did I want to trade tweets with Marcus Ginyard, who hopefully has better things to do with his time. I did find some people worth following though, and began tossing the occasional thing up there. With this being UNC's off week in football and thus this Saturday being open thread free, I thought I put it out to the world at large: I have a twitter feed. Consider it a DVD commentary on blogging, or don't consider it anything at all. Nevertheless, it's there.

And yeah, this whole post is an excuse to run that image at the top, which is probably my finest artistic accomplishment.

Jameel Sewell isn't the only one leaving the Carolina football team in the dust; I'm missing the thrilling duel with Georgia Southern for a long Columbus Day weekend in an undisclosed midwestern location. Originally, it was going to be Ames, Iowa, but all the flights there are mysteriously booked. So I'm seeking less crowded climes, and will remain happily out of contact with the wider world until next week.

(And this is why North Carolina needs a decent football team. Because in a sane world, the travel plans of two basketball coaches in the first week in October should never, ever, be considered anything remotely resembling news.)

Back in 1998, I went to Hartford, Connecticut for the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament. UNC was the number one seed in the East that year. And one afternoon, I found myself sitting with some friends in the coliseum attached to the mall that the town strangely built, watching Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter show off in the open practice for the team. One of the locals in the row behind us struck up a conversation; it was polite at first, but once he found out we were from North Carolina he kept asking us about what we did for fun. He had a definite preconception about the state, and kept pushing it on us: "You don't really having anything going, do you?" and "But there's really nothing interesting in North Carolina is there?" Keep in mind, this was Hartford Connecticut during a huge downturn in the insurance business, and the place was a ghost town for much of the time we were there. Finally annoyed by the implications, I turned to the guy, and with an expression of faux earnestness replied, "Well, we have a hockey team now."

The guy didn't speak to us the rest of the practice.

I tell this story as a preamble to an announcement. SB Nation has brought aboard a Carolina Hurricanes blog, Canes Country. The Hurricanes never really grabbed me. I saw a game amongst the empty bleachers of Greensboro Coliseum in the first season, and had the misfortune of dating a Red Wings fan during their first trip to the Stanley Cup that pushed me towards the team, but otherwise I let it pass me by. I'm sure there's some crossover between UNC fans and Hurricane fans, though, so here's the blog.

SB Nation doesn't have a blog for the minor league and now defunct Connecticut hockey team, the Beast of New Haven, or as I always remember them, the Greensboro Monarchs. Suck it, Hartford.

The fine folks at SBNation have put together a comprehensive BCS page, complete with rankings, scoreboards and links to the blog posts on each team in the BCS Top 25. Which includes UNC, sitting pretty for the moment at sweet sixteen. So go play around and see how you like it.

This blog will be going offline around midnight tonight, so all two of you jonesing for late night arguments for college football playoffs will have to find another internet diversion for the evening. I hear this "pornography" thing is becoming quite popular.

We'll come back up tomorrow, with a shocking change that will blow your mind.

(Unless of course you've read any other SBNation blog in the last two months. In that case, well, you know what's coming. Sorry.)

Back in the new year. Talk amongst yourselves.

You may have noticed posting has been light of late. (You may have not. Frankly, you may only be reading this because a particularly perceptive housepet walked across your keyboard. But we'll assume the former.) The reason posting has been so sporadic is very simple:

I went out and defended my doctoral thesis this week.

So now I'm Dr. Still Doesn't Blog Under His Real Name. And yes, I do appreciate the irony of this occurring while the rest of the internet was calling me stupid for picking UNC over ECU and Duke over UVa. I don't care, I'm a doctor now.

But what does this mean for the blog? Two things:

1. I now win all arguments on the internet. All of them. Playoffs are good, no one cares about the Rose Bowl, and Duke sucks. You have a problem with that? Don't care. Doctor.
2. I'm leaving the friendly environs of the West Coast, and heading back east. Not back to NC, but at least within driving distance of the games. Where? Let me put it this way. Expect a lot more posting about Brendan Haywood.

I've officially turned off anonymous commenting.

The SportsBlog Nation offically banned anonymous commenting a few months back as a spam prevention measure, but I kept in grandfathered in because I'm a fan of it - the energy barrier for me to actually create a login for a blog comment is pretty high. So even though it meant weeding out a couple of spam ads a day, I kept it open.

This weekend, however, another blog with anonymous commenting buckled under an entire database with spam comments, and the word came down from on high that the commenting policy had to be enforced, so here we are.

Signing up to comment is ridiculously easy, and only requires an e-mail address to prove you're not a robot trying to sell the world prescription medication. You won't get any e-mail from us and we won't pimp your address out to anyone. And you customize the look of the site to your liking, post diaries, and wreak havok all over the internet if you so desire.

So goodbye, anonymous comments. From the first (the lyrics to Aye Zigga Zoomba, for which I get a fair number of google hits for to this day) to the last (making fun of Rhode Islanders), they were all appreciated. And Wolfpack fans that only show up after a rare State win, I think I'll miss you most of all.

Next: More misguided ACC ramblings, I promise.