I don’t really like Matt Berry, but then again I hate the columns he (doesn’t actually) write. The information is decent though. Worth a watch. I may add a permanent video spot for the SportsCenter Minute on FM’s front page.

I guess it’s OK if I say this now, but I used to HATE ESPN.com’s home page. For at least the last 3 years, most of the time I was there, it had turned into a big, bloated, ugly, messy mishmosh of too much text, too much advertising, and too little organization. I would literally look at the Top Story area, and the headlines and then leave, immediately, to the safe, more pleasant confines of the various sport index pages inside the site. The only time I loved it was when it was converted into the “war” mode for major event coverage.

Late last week, however, ESPN launched a new version of the home page. I have to say, they basically fixed all of the problems and addressed a lot of the things I personally would argue for in meetings. Here’s a screen shot:

Think about what you’re seeing… there are only 2 ads above the fold. 2. Scores are front and center, and it’s clean and easy to read most of the content on the page. I’m still not a fan of the subdivided boxes in the second column (page 2, the Mag for example), because it’s easier to read when the widths are consistent all the way down. Overall, though, this thing is awesome.

My biggest, biggest super happy, Thank God you finally did it item is the fact that the page stops scrolling after one page down on my monitor. I don’t know if you remember, but the page used to scroll on for-freaking-ever. At least 3-4 page downs on my monitor, and on a 1024×768 or 1280×1024, that would be even worse. This one, I see the bottom pieces of content after hitting page down once. Love it, love it, love it. I personally would argue for this in meetings, but I couldn’t get edit to listen. I guess someone else made the more persuasive case. Whoever you are, you rock.

Now, any chance of bringing the photo gallery back to the front page? I miss it. The photography and photo editing at ESPN is one of it’s strengths. Wish we would see more than just the front page photo.

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.

This makes me proud of my team and the teams I work with at ESPN.com:

Considering the asynchronous nature of the Internet, to have two computers within about a half-second using the TCP-based protocol (we’re not doing what video games do) we use is pretty amazing. This is pretty cool.

Even better (though unfair in this test), is the fact that we’re ahead of TV. We’re probably actually closely in sync with TV, as I’m watching on my Slingbox which adds a few seconds of latency.

This is great stuff:

Love working here… smart people everywhere. Whoever got him to make this announcement here was brilliant.

I was working on some tweaks to a small research project here and made this handy little chart of blog posts that link to content at ESPN.com. It’s not a perfect tool, as it only captures links to stories on our major properties, but it gives a rough idea of the size of the sports blog universe as captured by Technorati. The data was captured using their developer API.

As you can see, there was a gap in data processing recently (hence the fact that I’m looking at this). I’m planning on exposing some of this data on the site. I think it’s a curiosity, more than anything else, but I’ve found some good blogs this way.

Did you know Bill Buckner was wearing a Cubs batting glove under his mitt? Apparently, neither did anyone else. Nice find, Sean.

(Note: I’m writing here on my own, not on behalf of ESPN or Disney Internet. I did work on this project, so I’m just excited and want to share that with my friends.)

I’m happy to say that MyESPN.com beta is finally available to the general public. It should be an excellent new application for sports fans to set up all of the teams, sports, and news they want in one place site. Instead of visiting a small handful of sites, you can now add the different parts of ESPN.com along with headlines and news from sites around the Internet to your MyESPN page. One stop and you’ve got all your sports and news from more sites in less time. Hopefully, MyESPN will make it easier for you to keep up with your favorite team, win at fantasy, and keep up with the other sites you love.

Savvy users who have used other similar products will hopefully find MyESPN easy to adapt to. I think that MyESPN brings the best sports content and breaks it out into very consumables pieces. You can see a screenshot of my page below sporting the Eagles theme. Click the image to see it full size.

Here’s a quick explanation of what you see. Each little box is called a module or capsule. You can drag them around, rearrange them, get rid of stuff you don’t like, or minimize sports that are out of season.

The great thing about MyESPN is that the modules are richer than many other sites. The top story module, for example, contains the image and all of the links that appear in the Top Story position on ESPN.com. After all, the photography on ESPN.com is one of our strengths. With MyESPN, you can personalize everything and still get the ESPN experience.

The rest of this post will be about using the site. Continue reading if you’re interested in some tips and hints.

New feature coming at ESPN.com that you will probably want to check out, especially if you’re a sports fan. Be sure to mouse over the red caption bubbles to see detailed explanations of the features of the app.

The Fantasy Games team at ESPN.com rolled out a pretty cool feature this year that allows users to run mock drafts using the actual draft application used in ESPN’s Fantasy Football game. The link is on the fantasy front page and it’s called “Mock Draft Lobby.”

The Mock Draft Lobby allows you to simulate an entire draft without having to do it with your actual league. After all, you don’t really want to draft with your actual league because you don’t want to give away any secrets. The Mock Draft Lobby allows you to start a mock draft within 10 minutes. You can draft with anywhere from 1 to 12 players, so you don’t even need a full room. The missing players will autopick using ESPN.com’s default player list. Of course, we’ve had pretty decent usage of the application, so many of the drafts during the day are full.

When you’re done the draft, the system even emails you with the result of the draft. Try it with a number of different people and you can get an idea of how people are valuing different positions.

It’s also a nice way to preview ESPN.com’s very slick live draft client. If you’re looking for a place to try out draft strategy, this might be the best way to do it.

Click on the image to see a full size screen grab.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies)

I saw Charlie Brooker’s Guardian piece, Supposing … I’m too old for MySpace, on both digg and on techmeme so I had to go read it.

As a fellow 30+ geek who doesn’t use MySpace, I feel the need to chime in. Especially since I’m building a social networking site at work. More on that in a minute.

The reason Brooker feels like he’s “a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew’s digital watch” is that he keeps thinking there’s a hook there, something that ought to appeal to him that doesn’t. The underlying implication is that as a good geek, he should see the draw of MySpace.

There are a couple of fundamental mistakes here. The first is that MySpace has something to do with geekdom and, by extension, technology. It has absolutely nothing to do with either. It has to do with the age group of those that use it and where they are in life. The New Yorker (Me Media, 5/15/06 issue) had one of the best explanations. They talked to a sociologist who believes being on MySpace is the modern alternative to hanging out at the mall for kids. Whatever the manifestation, kids and young adults need to see and be seen and to socialize. MySpace is about how younger people socialize and make friends.

For those of us past this stage of life, whatever our age, MySpace isn’t for us. A 30-year-old would probably feel as out-of-place just hanging out at the mall. Not that you can’t go to MySpace, see bands, get tickets, or whatever. You can still go to the mall. You just don’t hang out there.

The way to build a MySpace for older Internet users is to figure out what types of things adults are interested in having aggregated about them. If you have kids, for example, you might take more pictures of the kids than you do of yourself or your spouse. It might be a subtle difference, but it requires a few different features. I think a lot of different sites have a lot of the pieces, but the grown-up’s social networking site will have all of this functionality in one place.

The second misconception is that MySpace is the “be all, end all” for social networking. Because he doesn’t get MySpace, he must not get the whole social networking “thing.” That seems too simplistic. Sure, the core functionality is fairly common. Friendster, Facebook, Flickr, or LinkedIn all provide the same basic functionality. Adding friends, self-expression, and sharing are really all these sites are about. It’s a personal aggregator of things about you, and in that way, it’s pretty simple. It’s not the technology that sets them apart but the features and the product. “What do you share?” and “Why do you share it?” make all the difference. MySpace has done some smart things on that front which is why they’re so popular. Danah Boyd’s essay examines some of this, by the way, and is a great set of guiding principles for those of us building competitors.

I mentioned above that we’re building a social networking platform at ESPN.com. There is a team of folks here at ESPN.com including a number of folks in senior management who get this stuff. We see some things that we know we can do better than anyone else, so in September, we will launch our new social networking platform. Our plan is to bring out the basics then. Over the following months, you’ll see new features roll out that will make the ESPN.com offering even better.

This is one of the major projects my team is working on right now. I can’t really talk about the features in more detail, but here’s the summary of the September feature set from the Ad Age article:

ESPN is hoping to become the MySpace of the sports world. In September, it will unveil as part of ESPN’s Sports Nation property the tools for fans to create profiles, contribute to sports blogs, post opinions and link to favorite articles.

John Zaccario, VP-digital media sales and marketing at ESPN, revealed the plans to advertisers at a pre-NBA Draft party in Chelsea that also featured an appearance by NBA great (and ESPN basketball analyst) Bill Walton. “We want to make the sports fan the center of ESPN’s universe,” Mr. Zaccari said. ESPN will allow users to personalize their home pages and participate in blogs and discussions around favorite teams and sports.

There are some more features, but this is the general idea for the September launch. Even more features will roll out over the following months. I’m really excited to see how people use the site, and it should be fun to see where the fans take us.

I actually think the headline of the Ad Age article is wrong, by the way. The only way my team wants to be “MySpace for fans” is in our overall audience. Can’t complain about having 50-60+ million uniques, after all. Beyond the basics, though, we’re going to be very different and, I believe, a lot better. We’re very aware that people of all ages are sports fans whether they’re in the heavily courted 18-35 demo or not. We’re doing what we can to appeal to sports fans of all ages whether you’re in the MySpace crowd or not.

I don’t think Brooker will have trouble getting ESPN’s offering, especially if he’s a sports fan.

Want a job?

We still have some openings on this team, by the way, and if you get MySpace and you get sports and you’re a web developer either on the front end (DHTML, JS, PHP/JSP/ASP, AJAX, etc.) or the back end (SQL, Java, C#, etc.), send us your resume. The job description I linked to is for a particular position, but you can find the other open technology positions on our jobs web site. ESPN is an awesome place to work if you love sports.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies. I work for ESPN, but I’m writing here on my own. Nothing has been approved or sanctioned by anyone at ESPN.com or Disney.)

At 2:30 PM ET ESPN will broadcast the UEFA Champions League Final live. If you don’t know what that is, here’s an explanation from an internal email yesterday:

Tomorrow ESPN will televise live the UEFA Champions League final, the equivalent of the Super Bowl to soccer fans, in more than 100 countries and territories around the world. The match can be seen on ESPN International networks in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific Rim; ESPN Star Sports networks in Asia; TSN and RDS in Canada, and on ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes in the U.S. The match will be simulcast in high definition for the first time ever on ESPN2 HD.

…

This year’s final features FC Barcelona of Spain’s La Liga against Arsenal FC from England’s Premiership. I invite you to tune-in at 2:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday and watch some of the best soccer players in the world battle for Europe’s top prize.

You may not care much about soccer, but if you’re a sports fan and you’re near a TV, you will want to watch this. At about 2:45PM ET, I expect productivity around ESPN to drop significantly as TVs flip on at every desk and office.

European soccer has among the most interesting league setups in professional sports, and I’ve learned a lot since working here. In some leagues, teams can move between the equivalent of our major leagues and the minors depending on performance (in both directions). A bad season could drop a team from one league to another. Can you imagine that in baseball? Do you think that those MLB teams that sit on their revenue sharing dollars would continually field bad teams if they got demoted to triple-A for poor performance? That would be nice.

I’ve been hearing jokes about how no one cares, or that soccer sucks because the scoring so low and I’m a bit surprised. Are Europeans and, well, pretty much all of the other people in the world that much different than us? I find it hard to believe, but the ratings say that’s the case.

I’ll be watching as much as I can today (damn meetings), and I highly recommend it for everyone else.

You can learn more about the UEFA Champions League at Wikipedia or the UEFA league site. As always, you can keep up with the scores and news at ESPN’s Soccernet.

After an extraordinarily late night as part of the team that launched both the new ESPN.com and ESPN Deportes front pages last night, I really need some sleep.

I thought I’d pass on one bit of trivia about the launch, though. The most common complaint about the new design was the relocation of MyESPN from the far right hand column to below the fold on the second column. I didn’t participate at all in the design process for the new front page, so I have no real insight into why they decided to move it to the new location, but I do have to say that I’m surprised how many people complained about it. Of the negative feedback we’ve gotten, I would say fully half of it mentions the relocation of MyESPN specifically.

I’m surprised because I, uh, hated the MyESPN sidebar on the side. I like my browser windows to be taller than they are wide and having that fourth column didn’t really fit that preference. So, I rarely used it. I’ll see if I can get used to the new one, or see if I can build something a bit different that I like. (it’s nice to work there… )

Feedback in general has been mixed, but I suspect that most of the negative reaction will fade once the initial shock wears off. The new page is significantly different than the older design and will require getting used to. I do love some of the new design elements, and I’m not saying that because I work there… The new Spotlight section, for example, showcases brilliant images and photography. Our photo editors are among the best in the business and they really help set ESPN.com apart.

Of course, they didn’t bring back the awesome photo gallery tab we used to have, but I guess you can’t get everything.

Or, can you…?

Don’t know if you all saw this, but the Globe is running a profile of Scouts, Inc., one of the companies that provides extra analysis to ESPN.com. Check it out.

Interesting article at CNN Money about several companies’ plan to take on ESPN. Good read. From the article, talking about how the NFL could legitimize any upstart:

“We’re giving very serious consideration to being part of the launch of another major sports network on cable and satellite television,” Tagliabue said in February. “We’re also talking to other television networks and companies about the packages we have to sell, including the Thursday night/Saturday package we’re creating.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that the NFL was present in the delivery room for the birth of a major network.