The three of us have been extremely fortunate with RAB. The site has become more popular than I think we ever imagined, and our readership continues to grow by the day. More readers means more comments, and unfortunately more comments means more problems. We implore everyone - whether you’re a seasoned RAB vet or a total newbie - to review our Commenting Guidelines. We don’t have many rules here, but the ones we do have are important and are enforced.

We understand the Yanks are in the middle of a brutal slump, but we have to keep things in perspective. They’ve played just 28 games, not 128. The three of use are every bit as frustrated with the team as you, but that frustration doesn’t give you a green light to personally attack your fellow readers. We’ve always asked that if you disagree with something someone’s written, attack the idea, not the person. This goes for everyone, not just those new to the site or others who some may perceive as favorite.

(Note by Joe: Read this article, at least the part until he pimps his book. No one’s going to take the advice, but I figured I’d throw it out there in an attempt to reduce the personal attacks in the comments.)

To paraphrase a long lost commentor, River Ave. Blues is more or less for the intelligent fan. We’ve been lucky enough to establish a strong community of rational fans who are willing to defend their beliefs with facts rather than spout off nonsense based on pure emotion. If someone posts something idiotic, don’t go out of your way to call it that. Most people will silently agree with you, and responding to trash only leads to more trash.

This is just a friendly reminder from Ben, Joe and myself. We thank everyone who’s made RAB part of their lives, and we look forward to watching the team turn things around and finishing the year strong.

We take a short break from the baseball action to conduct some housekeeping for RAB. As you might know, we don’t make a ton of money with this venture. We can cover our increasingly expensive server costs with the meager revenue display ads bring and have enough to re-invest in the business (like our trip to the Winter Meetings). That’s fine and good, and if that never changes you won’t hear us complain (too much, anyway). Still, we’d like to see how far we can take this.

We’ll be right up front about this, so you guys know exactly what you’re getting into. The more money we generate from this site, the more time we can justify spending on it. That means, among other things, more in-depth commentary, more features, and fewer filler posts. Essentially, we’d like to turn this into a full-time gig, complete with clubhouse access. While we’re slowly moving in that direction, it’s not quite a reality yet.

One thing we can do to increase revenues is to sell advertising directly rather than using low-paying ad networks. To do so we need some information about our readers, which we can share in the aggregate with potential advertisers. No, your specific personal information will not be shared, as per our privacy policy. We just want to add up all the survey information and use that to entice advertisers. At that point perhaps we can boost our revenue and justify spending most of our time on the site. I think that’s an equation which benefits everyone.

So please, take a few minutes out of your day to fill out the survey. It’s only 13 questions, most of which are multiple choice. That minute or so of your life can prove invaluable to the future of RAB.

Take the RAB reader survey.

Another easy way to contribute to RAB: Support RAB through PayPal. We truly appreciate any time/money you guys can provide. It helps keep the site moving and growing. Just click the button below.

Regular baseball coverage will resume at 9 a.m., but we’d like to take a second to point out the many ways you can follow RAB throughout the 2009 baseball season. Specifically, we’re going to pimp our RSS feed, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

RSS feed

If you use RSS feeds, hopefully you’ve already subscribed to RAB. If not, you could do that right now. Click the Feedburner icon in the right sidebar and you’re set.

For those who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. To use RSS, you need an RSS reader like Google Reader. Instead of visiting your favorite sites individually multiple times per day, you subscribe to their feeds and the information comes to you. For a much more comprehensive overview of RSS, including links to a number of RSS readers, check out this site.

In case you need convincing, I present an IM Mike sent me in January:

Michael: i did something over the weekend that changed my life
i started using an RSS reader
it’s wonderful, everything comes to me

Do you really need any more convincing than that? Subscribe to our feed today. If you don’t, you’d better dead or in jail. And if you’re in jail, BREAK OUT!

Twitter

For the longest time I tried to ignore Twitter’s existence, but eventually it became too powerful. It’s this really annoying Web service where you send “tweets” to your “followers.” Then they can respond to your tweets, and everyone can see. Essentially, these are pubic mass emails, limited in size to 140 characters.

(Aside: One might think that William Strunk would approve of Twitter for the brevity it enforces. Alas, instead of omitting needless words Twitterers regularly omit “needless” characters and replace others with phonetic truncations. I weep for our language. Keith Law knows what I’m talking about.)

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow @riveaveblues. I swear, we don’t tweet our every post. That’s annoying. In fact, we hardly tweet any of our posts. It’s mainly just banter with the readers.

If you’re not on Twitter, I salute you.

Facebook

Every so often I check the RAB Facebook page and see who has become a fan recently. Not that I’d recognize any of the names — though seeing my little brother had joined without my prompting him was pretty cool. Anyway, this is the most neglected of our social media presences, but we promise we’ll work on it. Follow us, though. It’ll give us more motivation to better utilize it.

That wasn’t that bad, was it? Cool. The baseball talk will be back any minute now.