Dime Magazine, a New York-based basketball magazine that publishes in the US and China, features a full-page story on our basketball English lessons starring NBA players in its September edition. They let me pick the best quotes from the videos for the story. Click on the image to read it and download the whole issue here.

Our mission to help the world learn English from athletes and entertainers has garnered a lot of media attention since the last press round-up on this blog. Our lessons with world-famous DJ Girl Talk were covered by the Vatican of indie music, Pitchfork, as well as Prefix Magazine, Melophobe, The Miami New Times and The Music-RX. Our lessons with hip-hop legends Bone Thugs-n-Harmony got us back on the pages of XXL Magazine and HipHop DX.

Atlanta Hawks center Zaza Pachulia let us go through his suitcase before a road game for a fashion English lesson, and our pal Sekou Smith of NBA.com’s Hang Time blog gave us some love (link disabled due to lockout) as did the always kind Ball In Europe, and even the Hawks official site, which also covered our lesson with All-Star Al Horford (again, lockout = 404).

With our Portland Timbers now in the MLS, we’ve been focusing a lot more on soccer this season. A lesson with fan-favorite Gambian defender Futty Danso won the heart of Timbers blog, Dropping Timber. Lessons with French star Aurelien Collin landed us on soccer blog No Short Corners and Sporting Kansas City’s official Twitter feed.

Finally, Lindsay Pulsipher, an actress from one of my favorite TV shows, True Blood, recently appeared on Ebaby! and the Truebies took notice on sites such as True-Blood.net and TrueBlood-Online.com. The interview even made the local “Stardar Report” of Byron Beck. It’s nice to be popular.

2010 is still a few weeks away, but English, baby! has already got its first award of the year! Top Ten Reviews put together a list of the best ESL sites and we got the silver award. Yeah, I know, where was the gold? Well, you know what? Silver looks better with our orange and blue colors anyway. So there.

Seriously though, the review Wanda Richards wrote is the most in-depth analysis of the website put together by any journalist so far. She touched on every aspect of the site, from member submitted lessons to the chat room. It’s clear that she signed up for an account and spent some time–long enough to get our weekly newsletter which she wrote about too!

I especially love that Wanda came up with ways that English, baby! could be used by native speakers of English, such as finding pen pals overseas. But the best quote has to be this one:

English, baby! could be the poster child for social media integration for online English learning.

Thanks! That’s exactly what we strive to be. It’s nice to be understood.

For the past few months, English baby! has been featuring celebrity English lessons in which a star explains how to use a bit of conversational English.

Our most recent lesson with Sasha Vujacic of the LA Lakers, was featured on The Los Angeles Times website and the website of The Oregonian, as well as lakers-fan.com. The interview was also mentioned on The Los Angeles Times site before it was posted.

Ebaby! celebrity lessons have also been covered by many other media outlets:

• Portland Trail Blazer Nicolas Batum’s lesson appeared on basketusa.com, 95.5 The Game, PDX Pipeline, and Yahoo! Sports.
• San Francisco 49er Vernon Davis’ lesson appeared in The Press Democrat and The Mercury News
• The Thermals lesson appeared on localCut.

We’ve run a few surveys on English, baby! recently about the U.S. presidential election. As the race for the closely contested democratic nomination gets closer to the end, it looks like the opinion of some undecided Americans might be swayed by members of our site.

The Oregonian, Oregon’s daily newspaper, ran an article today titled, “World’s young adults say ‘Barack, baby!,” which covers the thoughts of our members regarding the election and who should win. While our first survey last year had Clinton in the lead, the current survey shows that opinion has flipped and Obama is now the favorite.

As the people of our world become more connected, major decisions such as presidential elections of all nations become more important to everyone. And to have the opinions of our members published here in the U.S. is a sign that Americans do care about foreign relations and our contribution to making the world a better place.

Our polls were also picked up by the World Wants Obama Coalition‘s website in a post called Swing to Obama among English language students. Their site helps explain the drastic shift in world opinion about our election. There have been Obama rallies around the world, like this one in France.

It’s so interesting to hear a mix of French and Obama’s slogan, “Yes we can!” We’re glad that we have been able to quantify some of the global attention to this election and that the American media is taking an interest in it.

Image: from the Oregonian’s home page.