http://design-feed.net

“Design-Feed is a design feed aggregator. [Design-feed] hand-pick the most interesting design related RSS feeds and present them in an easy-to-browse format. This means you can get all the latest design news in one place, rather than trawling through hundreds of sites a day. Every post aggregated is also searchable by keyword.”

Recently came across this nifty little video on YouTube that was put together by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. In the span of 5 minutes, it “chronicles” the history of the web with a focus on the social media revolution – or to some, the over-hyped hoopla – that’s being referred to as Web2.0. Regardless of whether you work on the web or not, this piece will have an impact on just about anybody whose life has been touched by the web in some way (… i.e. pretty much everybody on the planet).

It’s an old and tired tale by now – the employee who gets fired/harassed/suspended etc. for blogging.

But this case, involving an NCAA basketball coach being reprimanded for comments he made on his blog about the way his league is run, is of interest to me because it brings up the issue of blogs and sports, which is an intriguing topic.

Of course the most famous sports blogger, possibly the most famous blogger period, and certainly the richest, is Mark Cuban, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/) the billionaire owner of the NBA’s powerhouse Dallas Mavericks. Cuban made his billions (5 of them, if I recall correctly) by selling his audio/video streaming operation (the world’s first) called Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Cuban has always ‘gotten’ the web and he has been a tireless advocate for free speech, blogging and other progressive web initiatives ever since. He also posts regularly and answers many comments himself, something few billionaires and no other sports team owners do. (His post on the corporatization of YouTube was a killer: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/27/ripping-on-gootube-again2/) So, good for Mark Cuban. His team might even win the title this year, if they can get past the amazing Captain Canada and his Suns. (My money’s on the Suns.)

Another NBA blogpost that really knocked me out was this one, by former Raptor and current Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva: http://www.cv31.com/myjournal.html. This post was written last year by a 21 year-old NBA rookie who had just scored an amazing 48 points in a game, the most by a rookie since Michael Jordan, I believe. This post on his blog is not some typical ghost-written prefab pap nor is it sports journalism. It’s one young NBA player’s honest outpouring of feelings about an incredible experience he had just had. I loved it. I also found it indicative of the generation gap around blogging because I tried to imagine veteran sports stars sitting down and putting their feelings out there this way and it was inconceivable. (Barry Bonds: “So then I got another shot of ‘the clear’ and stepped to the plate…”)

It also made me think back to Ball Four (1970), the hilarious book by Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton that was the first ‘exposé’ of the life of a professional athlete, with its booze and hookers and juvenile hijinx. Bouton was excoriated by many (tho his book was a bestseller) for breaking a taboo that kept players’ realities shielded from their adoring fans. Of course the journalists were complicit in this, too. These days, things have changed, and the Internet has a lot to do with that. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube from NBA draft day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QibGO_QKzQE. The average Joe wasn’t privy to this kind of thing in the days of Harold Ballard. (Just imagine what that behind-the-scenes footage would have revealed…Yikes!)

Then there’s the Raptorblog, (http://www.raptorblog.com/) which has been a furious hotbed of Raptor fandom for many years. (If you notice a certain theme, here…yes, I am a huge Raptors fan). Apart from the high level of critical discussion on this board, which sees itself as able to deliver much more informed and knowledgeable writing than do the basketball writers for Toronto’s daily newspapers, it’s interesting to note that the moderator of this blog just took a job at MSN.ca as a senior sports editor. Another example of how blogging is a good career move.

When I think about it, as much as I like the new dynamics that have made sports more transparent, on some level I do long for the good old days too, when sports heroes were heroes to their fans even if they were pricks in real life. I remember when I was a young boy, my dad wrote a fine book called Babe Ruth and the American Dream (Random House, out of print). I went out with him on some of his research trips and got to meet several hall-of-famers who had played with Ruth, including the likes of Frankie Frisch, (The Fordham Flash) and kindly old Harry Hooper (who had been on the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the greatest baseball team ever). It was awe-inspiring. And although my father’s book made no bones about Ruth’s coarseness in person (imagine MeatLoaf with a bat) it also highlighted the incredible respect and love that he engendered among Americans of every race and class. It’s hard to imagine anything like that today – in the era of OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, of Terrell Owens and Mark McGwire, of season-long player’s strikes and endless testing of the free agent market. Maybe Gretzky was the closest thing to Ruth we’ve known in a long time. Now if we can just get The Great One to blog…

Digg officially turned 2 today! As a person who visits the site at least two or three times a day, I actually have to try pretty hard to imagine a net without Digg.com’s user-generated news stories dancing across my homepage like little nuggets of Internet gold. Is it the greatest website ever created? Will it change the world? Will Kevin and Alex ever do a podcast sober? I think we all know the answer to all three questions: Probably Not. It’s just a damn good website that does something really simple really well.

Digg’s true contribution to the net as a place for open social bookmarking and user-generated content has shown us that there are a lot of “regular” (and I don’t mean in terms of grooming or hygiene) people out there willing to do the work of editors, authors, and publishers. And even better, millions of people are willing to read it and comment on it!

The most interesting thing about the “Digg Effect” is that there are a lot MORE people out there who will debunk and cry foul of any news story that is falsely popular or even completely fake. Nothing lasts long on the Digg homepage if it doesn’t cut the mustard with the majority of users. Spam, Hate Literature and Propaganda rarely if ever make it past the users and onto the front page, and that is what I think makes Digg so successful in its execution.

Is it perfect? Of course not. Nothing is. There will always be people abusing the system, taking advantage of exploits and loopholes. But the majority of people who use Digg find it’s a great place to do some surfing, learn a little, and keep up on current tech events. And isn’t that what democracy is? It’s not perfect, but it’s the best system we have, right?

The greatest achievement – and perhaps its Achilles Heel – is the fact that Digg has “Web 2.0′d” a very basic concept called “Freedom of Speech”. (Remember that one? Yeah, I know it’s been kind of under attack lately) But even when the vast majority of people are freely expressing their thoughts and ideas, there’s always going to be people – hiding behind the security of anonymity – who spread lies, hatred, and ignorance. Hey, Free Speech has its downsides, but I’ll take it over any other system! As with any medium of information, you need to consider the source of the information and – if necessary – take with a grain of salt (or the whole shaker).

So Happy Birthday Digg! Don’t change your ways! We love you just the way you are!

Unfortunately I missed the first BarCamp Ottawa earlier this year, but Brett Tackaberry and I attended BarCamp Ottawa 2 yesterday at Bitheads HQ and I have to say that it was definitely a worthwhile trip. I’ve only been to a handful of conferences over the years (all of which cost several hundred dollars to attend) and for something that was put on by the community for the community (and free for those attending) I must say that I was a bit skeptical about how smoothly things would run. But at the end of the day I was quite impressed with the overall quality of the speakers and the event itself.

A couple highlights worth noting:

• Kakiloc gave a brief presentation on their “location-based social network” that helps you physically connect with friends and family via mobile phones (think dodgeball). The technology is still in its infancy without widespread GPS or triangulation available on most mobile phones, but the possibilities are really unbelievable. On top of being notified where your friends are in real time (assuming they give you permission to see that), think about walking into a grocery store and having your shopping list automagically texted to you. How cool would that be? I mean… the sky is the limit with this kind of stuff.
• Mitch Brisebois, an ex-Nortel guy, gave a very entertaining presentation called “Great technology, terrible results” that profiled a few flops that came out of Nortel during the early 90s. The one thing they had in common was a great underlying technology that was just poorly developed or mis-marketed with horrible results. Lesson learned: think about the customer from step 1. They might not always know what they want, but they’re the ones who’ll be using it.
• Stacy Young from Adobe gave a quick rundown of Flex. Nothing that new as I’d seen demos of Flex and Apollo at FITC in April, but since I haven’t started using it myself it was another reminder that I should be. Very cool stuff.

Kudos to all those who made BarCamp Ottawa 2 possible. Looking forward to the 3rd edition!

“TV is dying” is a tired cliche at this point but i think it’s also true. Just look at the numbers in this report published by the BBC yesterday. It suggests that 43% of people in the UK who use online video are watching less TV than they used to as a direct result. And of those, nearly half say they are watching ‘a lot less’ TV than they used to. How many people are using online video? We can assume that everyone who has broadband does so, and while I don’t have the UK numbers handy, penetration rates are running at 45% of all households in the USA and 55% in Canada. And that doesn’t even take into account people who check out videos at work. So we’re talking about a substantial minority of the population switching from video-via-tv to video-via-web.

That really is big news. Will it be a surprise to anyone if in a year or two those numbers are twice as high as they are today? I know that when I moved to Ottawa a few months ago I left my two TVs behind and I haven’t missed them. I keep up to date on news events via the web and RSS feeds, I watch sports highlights on NFL.com and NBA.com, and I get plenty of comedy (including some of my favourite old shows like Absolutely Fabulous) on YouTube and elsewhere. When I need a video fix I get all I need online, or I rent a movie, and obviously I’m not alone.

What I’m really waiting for, though, is for marketing budgets to start to reflect this increasingly important trend. Currently media buys of many millions of dollars are normal for businesses that invest only marginally in online marketing. One day, and hopefully soon, Directors of Marketing will start to understand that they can get a far greater bang for their buck online, and that for the price of a small TV campaign (producing an ad and buying eyeballs via TV), they can run earth-shaking online campaigns that will reach far more people and accomplish far more from a customer-development and retention perspective than been-there-done-that TV ads.