As the Sports Reference sites have grown, so has the level of interest of our users. And so has the time committed to responding and working with users. I'm not complaining as that is an important part of our job. I've always felt that the best ideas come from users telling us how they want to use the site and where we aren't meeting their expectations.

But....this aspect of the job has soaked up more and more of our time, so much so that when I come to work on Monday, most of the day is spent just cleaning out my e-mail inbox. So we've done what any growing company would do. We hired a really smart, knowledgeable person to take over this job.

Neil Paine started this week as our user affairs coordinator. He is going to handle most user e-mail, work on user education and training initiatives, and work on lots and lots of special projects. Neil is a recent graduate of the Georgia Tech's Science, Technology and Culture (STAC) Program, and he'll be based near Atlanta. He possesses a broad knowledge of all of our sports and is perhaps best known as our stellar basketball blogger. Besides being a good writer, he has a lot of math savvy, so we are really excited to have him onboard.

As a user, not much should change for you other than your e-mails will get answered sooner and bugs will be fixed faster.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 10:05 am and is filed under Administration, Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.