Most popular in harness racing

Did you know that you’re reading one of the most popular web sites in all of horse racing?

No, not my blog---in fact, you might be the only person reading my blog. I’m referring to the Standardbred Canada web site.

I also didn’t know it was one of the most popular in harness racing until I saw a recent listing of the top harness sites.

With stats taken by Alexa (as of June 11) and published in July's Trot, the Standardbred Canada ranked first in harness racing and eighth overall among all sites that cover horse racing.

That’s an impressive accomplishment, and I give a tip of my hat to the SC team and especially to Jeff Porchak for making it happen. When you consider all the web sites in the Thoroughbred world that have true international appeal, the SC ranking in the top 10 is amazing.

The list (which was published in Trot Magazine) showed the top 50 harness sites and also where those sites ranked in the overall horse racing kingdom on the web. As of today, July 8, the USTA website and SC's website rank fourth and sixth respectively among all horse racing websites.

I spend more than my fair share of hours on the web and regularly visit various sites but there are only so many sites you can surf. It gets overwhelming. So you narrow it down to your daily favorites that you simply must check and to others that you check once in a while.

I like several Thoroughbred sites and I’m dazzled when I visit them. That sport is a lot bigger than harness racing and there is more money to be made in it, so it’s not surprising that there are some excellent TB web sites.

I also find some very interesting foreign web sites that pertain to harness racing and I visit sites in Sweden and France with some regularity. Of course, the popularity of these sites is limited by the language; I’d be lying if I said I could “read” everything on Swedish or French web sites, but I can often glean results and get the general drift of an article.

As good as the SC site is, I fully suspect that we’ll be able to look back on this site in five or 10 years and have a good chuckle at how rudimentary it is by the standards of the future. You’re certainly going to see more advances on web sites in bringing you information.

The internet is a wonderful tool and Standardbred Canada has done its job well. Bravo!