insights from the digital future
With less than one week left in the regular season and the Cubs magic number at 4, I’m ready to talk playoffs. While the 2007 National League playoff race is still Cubs fans like myself, with potential opponents including Arizona, San Diego, and *gulp* a potential World Series showdown vs. Anaheim.
Continue reading “Ideal Playoff Scenario for West Coast Cubs Fans”
A long-awaited week off finds me among family and old friends in Chicago — and I can’t seem to get away from Wrigley Field, where my beloved Cubs have told me over the course of the past two days, that, yes, indeed, this is a special year, in spite of the slow, 4-9 start to August.
5 years $91 million for Big Z, Carlos Zambrano — add to that the fat contracts of our other young studs — Ramirez, Lee and Soriano — and whoever buys out the Cubbies from the Tribune this offseason will be investing in a winner (and maybe even a World Series champion?!?). Thanks Jim Hendry, according to Z, Hendry has been “his man” ever since drafting him as a 16 year old.
I was lucky to have seats in the 5th row behind the dugout today — and it was the dry run for the Chicago Air Show. Some photos on my flickr here.
Banged out some quality posts this morning for LAist, please read my Max Roach obit here and my editorial on the Crandall Canyon (Utah) mine disaster coverage here.
I posted a nice long interview with James Joyner of Outside the Beltway at LAist. Other videos are going up (as well as more blog posts) on the Knight blog for the Politics and Cyberspace conference that I am covering for them.
Finally, if you’re in LA, drop me a line if you’d like an invite to a little BBQ I’m having this Saturday afternoon to celebrate the end of grad school.
I was kind of struck by this article in the NY Times yesterday. Most of the controversy in international sport seems to stem from corruption at the highest levels of the organizations be it FIFA or the IOC. But, according to this article, athletes at the Pan Am Games in Brazil this summer will be banned from blogging. I find this kind of appalling as it entirely counters the history of sport as a form of entertainment. For no reason that I can deduce, this practice of banning blogging, which has spread to Rugby and the Olympics as well, only shortchanges the sports world (it’s few stars and billions of fans) in this digital age of increased interactivity and transparency.
Or, as a sports ethics researcher says in the article, “The danger is that no real discussion about events on and off the sports field can take place, reducing us to millions of passive sports-consuming robots.â€
Some obvious examples point out the idiocy of this policy. Politicians now engage with their constituents online, as do musicians and other celebrities… Washington Post columnists are expected to participate in live online chat’s with readers.
In fact, today’s athletes and global icons should be encouraged to blog. They deserve the opportunity to add dimensions to their personalities why are already so public. Eventually this could influence society into thinking that American Idol isn’t the pinnacle, but in fact is about as irrelevant a form of expression as an assist in soccer or Donald Trump’s egotastical media contribution, The Apprentice.
Researchers like Jane McGonigal believe the future of games, particularly of games in education, government or industry, might well lie in players’ ability to work together to solve problems. This extends to both ubiquitous, online games and virtual worlds and in real-life gaming and sport.
Ah, but I ramble. Some interesting sport-celeb blogs include the NBA’s Gilbert Arenas’ Agent Zero Blog. Nate(dogg) Robinson’s The gr8 Life blog is excellent. The Bulls’ Ben Gordon blogs on his MySpace page, UFC fighter Evan Tanner is also on MySpace. There are NFL player blogs, (also a good read — the archived entries of former NFL player Ricky Williams.