Rights issues in sports are a major concern for companies like ESPN and also the leagues like the NFL and NCAA. You only have to look at the rights fees companies pay to cover sports live or at the money leagues like the NFL make signing away something as simple as mobile data rights. The latest example, and an interesting one at that, involves a Louisville newspaper that tried to have a “live blog” of the NCAA Baseball tournament.

From the article:

A reporter was ejected from an NCAA baseball tournament game for submitting live Internet updates during play.

Brian Bennett, a writer for The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal, was approached Sunday by an NCAA representative in the bottom of the fifth inning and told that blogging from an NCAA championship event is against NCAA policies.

…

The newspaper said the university circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA’s manager of broadcasting, before the first super regional game Friday. It said blogs are considered a “live representation of the game” and blogs containing action photos or game reports are prohibited until the game is over.

If you think this is a relatively esoteric issue, consider the fact that mobile phones and even regular cameras are getting the capability to transmit digital images directly to sites like Flickr or Photobucket. Fans will be in a position to taunt their friends (“Wish ya were here!”) or instantly share accounts of the game as they happen.

This ought to be a fair use of admission. Fans are simply sharing their experiences, after all, and this doesn’t diminish the value of consistent, live data feeds like those provided by ESPN or the NCAA. This isn’t the case, however, as big money is involved.

Let me give you another example. The NFL is by far the worst offender when it comes to rights enforcement bordering on the stupid. They restrict any site, including partners like ESPN, from offering live play-by-play that offers any detail. They want to have a monopoly on that data on the Internet, and they want to control their partners on other digital platforms (Hello, Nextel).

So, every fall, we used to sit on our hands just waiting for the latest ridiculous demand from the NFL. Two NFL seasons ago, we literally had to rewrite parts of the site to pull any play description beyond “Rush, 12 yards” from the site because the NFL didn’t want us showing as much data as NFL.com. We also couldn’t show a drive chart that showed the results of each play (too much information!) and instead had to focus on a continuous line for each drive. It was stupid, and it wasn’t like it really increased the value of the NFL.com pages with the same data. We also had to pull the play-by-play summary for each quarter until it was completely over. It was ridiculous.

Ultimately, though, since online data rights are measured in the thousands and TV rights are measured in the millions per year, the online rights suffer to maintain the more lucrative TV rights. So, leagues like the NFL and the NCAA feel OK to beat up on small papers and web sites, even when they’re owned by places like ESPN.

I strongly recommend that fans punish such behavior by avoiding the league sites directly. They’re just trying to bilk you for even more money. I do have to point out that ESPN was probably indirectly the reason that this newspaper got shoved out of the NCAA baseball tourney, though. We had a big push to secure online rights to that tournament before I left, and I know ESPN is the TV partner for that event. So… boycott that if you must, but then again… it’s college baseball. I’m sure most of you are boycotting it without even knowing.

Seriously, though, these sorts of policies will leave only the leagues and big, big companies like ESPN or Fox Sports as your source for coverage of your favorite teams. Those of you that deal with MSG, YES, and NESN already have a taste of what this will be like, and an idea of why your cable bill is so ridiculous.

I’m always wondering why more companies don’t help bloggers do their thing. It’s in their best interests, after all, because more people talking about your content or products and more people using your services ends up being good business. Of course, I work at such a company and I can actually address this issue directly, if only for one vertical.

So, today marks the first release of a prototype tool for bloggers who blog about sports. This isn’t a finished product yet, and I’m hesitant to get it out because it’s not polished, but you know what? I want the feedback. So, if you’re a blogger, here’s what I have. Give it a try and let me know what you think. If there’s interest, we’ll get a finished product built and

Basically, I have a small app which will pump out scoring alerts for different sports. So far, I have NBA and NFL ready to go. For each app, there are programmed notifications for key events. In the NBA version, I’m just using clock time. Alerts will be queued for games that cross 12 minute, 8 minutes, 4 minute, and end of quarter boundaries. I’ll be improving the logic as I refine the application. The NFL version will queue alerts every time a quarter starts or ends, plus on any scoring event.

Here’s a demo for what they will look like:

The video is fuzzy because of the encoding (it actually looked worse on YouTube). It also is quite small compared to the web page. It looks huge on the video because I had to make the window small to fit it in the Google Video size limits. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on my monitor:

If you are interested in trying it out, all you need to do is add this script tag to your blog, anywhere on the page:

This is a prototype tool and as such may stop working, may break your layout, or may just generally be problematic. I hope not, though. Let me know if you find any bugs. Oh, and even the ID attribute above is important. Please leave the entire tag intact when you add it to your blog or site.

I haven’t tested the NFL one, but will be tomorrow during games. Feel free to change NBA above to NFL tomorrow to see it work. It won’t do anything tonight, since there are no games and also because I’m not running the process to generate the updates.

Currently, you can only have one or the other on your page at a time. This is just a limitation for the prototype. You will be able to choose more configurable alerts in the final product, assuming there’s enough interest to build one. Of course, let me know what features you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do.

If you aren’t interested in this product, that’s OK. Let me know what tools you’d like to see. I have several I’ve built for use here on FatMixx that I’m cleaning up for release. These include plugins for WordPress to make the task of writing about sports easier. They’re basically versions of the tools we offer our own editors and writers, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have them, too.

(P.S. I feel like I should say that this isn’t the finest app ever built and unlike many things that ESPN does, it doesn’t quite have that flair and polish. It will, but I want to get this conversation started. As they say, release early, release often. I want to make sure we can get feedback before we build something perfect for us, but useless for you.)

Heidi is currently on the Emerald Isle and blogging her trip every other day or so. No photos yet, but lots of stories. Just wanted to let folks who didn’t regularly read her blog know. Enjoy.

I forgot to post this up the day she wrote it, but Heidi has been getting into the local politics of West Hartford and Connecticut. We saw a number of signs in our neighborhood for Beth Bye when she was running for school board. We were curious about who she was which lead to a post or two at Heidi’s blog. A commenter pointed out that Beth Bye is running for State Rep, so Heidi decided to interview her for her blog.

She hasn’t posted the interview up yet, but her meta post about how she felt interviewing Beth Bye is interesting by itself.

We’ve learned a decent amount about the local political scene in a short time (not that we’re experts by any stretch). It doesn’t hurt that our next door neighbor works for the Speaker of the state legislature and candidates like Beth live a few blocks away. I’ll post up a link when Heidi gets done with the interview post.

I’ve had another friend ask me to help set up a blog for them. For a variety of reasons, I’m going to host it. Since this is the fourth blog I am now hosting for others, I’m thinking about installing WordPressMU, the multiuser version of WordPress that’s under development. I have custom tools that I’m adding all the time to the FatMixx installation (including an automatic athlete name linker and some ad tools that are under development), and this seems to be the easiest way to offer those type of features to everyone in a centralized manner.

If you’re interested in being a guinea pig on this install, let me know. What I’ll likely do is set this new person up with a standard WP installation, but then I’ll work on the MU install and work on the migration software to move them to the MU install when it’s stable.

I think this could be kind of fun. Centralize the management and hosting costs and let everyone manage and run their own blogs and templates (including their own advertising accounts, Amazon associates info, etc.). And, it makes my life easier so that I’m not updating 4 WordPress installations each time there’s an update. I’m not looking forward to the WordPress 2.0 upgrade process, especially after some of the grief others have had.

I’ve been doing a comparison of a couple of different web site analytics packages over the last few weeks. Originally, it was just Site Meter vs. Google Analytics, but last week I finally got my invitation to the Measure Map beta. As of right now, FatMixx is configured for all three services, and I’ve been poking around at the numbers and comparing the tools. While FatMixx is not exactly a major blog or website by any means, we have enough traffic to compare the services and see how they do.

I started comparing these tools to see what else was out there aside from Site Meter. I’ve been using Site Meter on FatMixx for over a year now and like what it offers. Exposure to an enterprise level service like HitBox at work got me thinking about whether there was anything better out there. After a bit of searching around, I settled on testing two other services. I’m using Site Meter as my baseline so I’ve included a writeup for them below. Let’s take a high level look at the three services.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I don’t have much to say about this, but the speculation seems right on the mark to me: a soldier was not only told to stop blogging, but seems to have been told to apologize with some very specific language. “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” indeed.

Peter Daou has a great essay on the intersection of blogging and politics, including how he thinks they can be the most effective. I would replace bloggers, though, with activists and reach the same conclusion. The issue is rigor in chasing down leads and stories and the mainstream media is slowly eroding their own capabilities for investigation. Or, at least they’re focusing on different types of investigations (“Is your house full of deadly ant droppings? Find out next!”)… Activists have always fought to raise attention to their issues, so Daou’s model isn’t that new.

Blogging is, of course, a different type of activism and therein lies the newness. Daou lays out a good model to start from, but I’m waiting for someone to explain/identify/build the next step in this model, maximizing the effectiveness of bloggers. How do you take a blogging meme and push it into the regular media? How do Republican blogger/activists do this well now?

(found via Atrios)

Jason Kottke is complaining about Technorati on his blog. I think, at the end of the day, he’s absolutely right. I had hoped at some point to be able to use Technorati’s data and technology for this research project I have going on at ESPN.com, but quite frankly the data has been so inconsistent that I’ve been forced to start looking around.

I’ve been doing a comparison of PubSub and Technorati and just want to second Kottke’s observations. PubSub has more results, seems a bit more timely, and is consistent. Technorati, well, when they’re working works alright, but seems pretty limited in their functionality. The main limitation of PubSub is that they don’t expose traditional search functionality: you can’t look back at what people have been saying, you can only get notified in the future about posts that match your terms. It’s great for watching your blog or for links to ESPN.com, say, but sucks when you’re trying to research blog reaction to the latest speech by Bush or blog reviews of the Mighty Mouse.

Just one other thought. The problems all started with the redesign of the site, really. It used to be hit or miss but nowhere near as bad as it is now. My Sports Buzz posts on FM suck now because clicking “Read Blogs” more often than not gets you an error message rather than actual blog entries. What good is the fancy redesign if the basic functionality is broken?

Especially since it seems like a parlor trick when it actually does work. I think they cache the results to successful queries which means that if it’s a common search or a common tag, you’ll get results. Do anything the least bit unusual and you’ll get an error page. So, it’s unclear how timely the results actually are… I do notice that the tag queries seem more reliable than regular search terms, but I suspect that it’s easier to index and catalog them (the users have already done the hard work of choosing which words to associate the post with…

Update: Have to second Kottke’s note about IceRocket. I’ve been playing around with them for the past hour or so and they’re pretty solid. On the surface, they’re competing with Technorati on what I see as key features (allowing users to directly ping them rather than relying on the blo.gs cloud) and with link counts (what Technorati calls authority), and some other details. The implementation of “linking blogs” looks especially interesting and I’ll be implementing this on FM soon, I think.

Here’s the latest sports buzz as defined by bloggers. The following ESPN.com articles were mentioned most often on blogs.

The Pistons blog at MVN, Motoring, has a good take on the top story, Larry Brown’s departure from Detroit. Because of the rumors that started during the playoffs, the story didn’t catch many by surprise. People were still annoyed, though. Read on.

16 – NBA – Pistons, Brown close to buyout of coaching contract [Read Blogs]
9 – GOLF/BRITISHOPEN05 – Woods goes wire to wire for British Open win [Read Blogs]
8 – Page 2 – Bayless: Riff Raff [Read Blogs]
7 – NFL – Super agent: Rosenhaus saves drowning boy [Read Blogs]
7 – http://games.espn.go.com/cgi/flb/OutOfTheBox/index [Read Blogs]
6 – NFL – Owens will report, but ‘won’t be happy’ [Read Blogs]
6 – NHL – Penguins win chance to draft phenom Crosby [Read Blogs]
6 – http://sports.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/fiftyfifty/index [Read Blogs]
6 – OLY/TDF2005 – Lance goes all out, wins Stage 20 [Read Blogs]
6 – NHL – NHL, players’ union reaches agreement in principle [Read Blogs]
6 – http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=250720120 [Read Blogs]
5 – Page 2 – Jackpot Jay: Poker’s 10 commandments [Read Blogs]
5 – http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?statsId=4217 [Read Blogs]
5 – MLB – Leiter making Yankees return [Read Blogs]
5 – COLUMNIST – Wojciechowski: The Big One [Read Blogs]
5 – NBA – Net gains: Abdur-Rahim, Robinson agree to deals [Read Blogs]
5 – NCAA – Northwestern flip over White House visit flap [Read Blogs]
5 – http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index [Read Blogs]