The beauty in writing is unfettered, untainted, and unrestrained access to the single mind of a brilliant person. That mind may lead you on a humorous parade of clever fan fiction. Perhaps the author’s biting wit will make you laugh until your stomach hurts. Often, the writer’s life experiences illuminates an issue with an original perspective. If films are collective madness with a normally drunk director barely holding things together by a thread, then writing is the creation of a perfectly singular world. One vision. One creator. One creation.

However, it seems like it should make sense that two authors would be twice as good. After all, we know simple math. One plus one equals two. Two is more than one. Right? Wrong. Continue reading “FSOU – the Tragic Allure of the Half-Assed Tag Team Post” »

No top online university diploma mill would be complete without a proper career services division. Thus, we at FSOU offer some insight into finding paid work from Brooks Peck of the award-winning Dirty Tackle.

We here at FutSail Online University take our commitment to preparing you for success in the real world very seriously. So it is with great regret that we inform you that every one of you will most certainly fail in all of your blogging endeavors.

Even if you have thousands of Twitter followers and receive regular impersonal bulletins from various PR firms, you will never monetize any of it and will end up wasting years of your life on something no one but you actually cares about. Of course, this doesn’t apply to you because you are special — it just applies to all of your classmates who are thinking the exact same thing. With that in mind, feel free to disregard this list of alternative careers that pay actual money at your own peril. Continue reading “FSOU – Careers to Consider When You Soon Fail at Blogging” »

Outsourcing. You can’t escape it, especially in journalism. Soccer is the global game, and you must make use of global resources to cover it in style. When done intelligently, outsourcing will cover you from defamation liability, protect your journalistic credibility, and also reduce the costs of investigating facts. In sum, you can more quickly serve a low cost product while retaining your delightful profits.Don’t believe me?

Let’s take a look at some cases studies. Continue reading “FSOU – Outsource Factchecking and Journalistic Integrity” »

Ahh, the inverted winger. Is there a simpler term in soccer? Basically, you take a winger, have him stand on his hands or preferably balance on his head, and he plays the remainder of the game as such. His arms and neck do get tired usually around the five minute mark, but he was always a slouch in defense so the team doesn’t miss a beat. Or does it?

Inverted winger. False nine. Holding midfielder. Libero. Soccer has developed its own lexicon of terms that sounds like jibber-jabber to the outside world. The current FSOU intern (who prepares my coffee every morning), Elliott, wrote a soccer ebook trying to teach this soccer language in Spanish. It was appalling. Six months later, and it has yet to hit the million sales mark. Why? Because elitism is in baby, not inclusion.

And you must also learn to use soccerspeak to exclude others. Or the soccer interwebs will eat you alive. Continue reading “FSOU – Wielding Language as a Flaming Sword of Exclusion” »

Doctor Julius Limbani is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Stoical Metamatrices and Applied Gaffer Tapenology at Croydon University. For years he acted as chief consultant for the sadly defunct, never award winning hardly hitting football NewsBlog, the Onion Bag.

Dr Limbani has taken a keen interest in the volumarctics of the ever expanding football media and is excited by its potential. In this brief headfographic, he takes a few moments to explain the concept the Multi-Platform Social Blogging Webinar.

Here at the Multi-Platform Social Blogging Webinar we are committed to socialising your reader experience via the medium of hydra-sociable networks and alleviated engagement tools. Alleviation is an essential and an exciting development in the increasingly competitive field of football bloggary. Continue reading “FSOU: Untroducing the Multi-Platform Social Blogging Webinar” »

It is a particular pleasure of mine to have been invited by my hero and inspiration, the good Dr. Gumperteer, to contribute to this series of lectures. I owe so much to him. You see, my own site, Sport Is A TV Show, struggled for years to attain the kind of success it so richly deserved. Sure, such articles as “The 101 Greatest Manx Footballers”, “Watching Football: You’re Doing It All Wrong, You Muppet”, and “Lydersen: A Pal To Us All” attracted a golden shower of critical acclaim (“Blinding!”: The New Yorker).

But the site’s page view figures and ad revenue were John Carter embarrassing. Continue reading “FSOU – Zen & the Art of Niche Sports/Leisure Website Maintenance” »

What happens when a story breaks, but you can’t think of an original angle? You copy and recycle. Duh. But what happens when everybody has beaten you to the copy & recycle “10% different article” pipeline? You can’t just languish on Page 2 of Google. You must fight back. You must take a very hard and distinct stance. In sum, you must become a troll. You must spew fire.

And that is why the art of the controlled flame is essential to sportswriting. Continue reading “FSOU – Trolls Still Need Love & Also Click on Banner Ads Too” »

FSOU is pleased to announce a guest lecture from Clive Longbottom-Fellow, Esquire, of the always delightful NutmegRadio.com. He avoids twitter. However, if you tweet @NutmegRadio, a graphic design volunteer may retumble Clive your tweet. Please pay very careful attention.

Welcome. Or as they say in England, welcome.

Today’s lesson is about building a foundation to express yourself in a headline. We will focus on the pun, a literary tool invented by either the English or the New York Post (as opposed to the deceased, self-proclaimed actor-slash-rapper who further proclaimed that he wasn’t a player but just crushed a lot). Although debates still rage over the origin of puns, fortunately in 2012, through the wonders of modern technology and online education, that uncertainty no longer impacts one’s ability to craft an airtight headline. Continue reading “FSOU: Introduction to Punderful Headlines 101, KONY 2012” »