Sports and A Social Experiment

Over the holiday period I was reading about the attempts by the NCAA to prevent bloggers from reporting at their events. This really is a case of old-style thinking failing to get to grips with the opportunities offered by new technology.

I would like to conduct a social experiment to demonstrate that resistance is futile and the powers that be are better to accept the new order and think about how they can exploit the potential of these new technologies.

Before I detail the experiment let me lay out a few seemingly random thoughts and then pull them all together.

1. Twitter is on the verge of going mainstream
2. Hashtags are emerging as a new way of self-organizing on Twitter
3. Fumbleview is a great iPhone application for play-by-play game coverage

If the NCAA and other groups are seeking to throttle the reporting of bloggers then let's demonstrate that resistance is futile! Here is how we do it.

1. Go to my Twitter page and follow me: http://twitter.com/ekivemark. Actually that step is optional but it would be neat to know if you were joining in with the experiment!
2. Use your twitter account to follow the twitter user hashtags.
3. I have already gone on to twitter and logged tags for #NFL, #NFC #AFC and each Team Name. eg. #redskins
4. Go to hashtags.org and look up the team tag, conference or NFL tag you want to follow.
5. Grab the RSS feed for the hashtag you want. eg. For the Redskins it would be feed://www.hashtags.org/feeds/tag/Redskins/ so you can work out what each feed string would be. Add that feed to your preferred reader.

Now all we need is for people (bloggers) at a game, or watching on TV to send scoring tweets. eg. "#NFL #NFC #redskins 21 #mariners 14"

This could be applied to any sports, the NCAA - how ironic that would be, the NBA, the NHL, the MLB. Now we have a day to iron out the syntax. Should we use the city abbreviations such as "#NFL #NFC #WAS 21 at #SEA 14" 

Who wants to get involved? Send me a tweet and let me know.