| Added for You |
Hubs | Hubbers | Topics | Request |
| #1 in Business | Subscribe Email Print |
|
You are here: Home > Recreation and Sports > Baseball > Geeks and Baseball |
|
Added for You - Geeks and Baseball
Phthalates Reduce Male Hormones; Pesticides Cause Infertility er fans throughout the country. This couldn't possibly affect the actual sport itself right? Wrong. Fantasy Baseball has a huge impact on fan interest. Did your team throw in the towel mid-season, or currently in an unwatchable rebuilding year? That’s OK. You can still follow your fantasy team and can continue to watch games involving your players via the MLB Baseball Cable Package. Major League Baseball is a product, and anything that allows your customers to constantly read, write, and talk (thus promoting) about your product in a passionate way becomes important.A recent study shows that phthalates present in pregnant women result in their boy babies having smaller less developed genitals. There is further concern that as the boys grow up, they may be affected with late puberty, lower testosterone levels and sperm count, and be more susceptible to testicular cancer.Phthalates are solvents, coatings, perfume fixatives, and plasticizers (added to PVC plastic in order to make it more flexible). Phthalates are found in plastic bottles, food containers, and they are found extensively in children's toys.Phthalates are also found in hundreds of other products, such as hair spray, coatings on time-released medicines, soap, shampoo, nail polish, hair sprays, detergents, and vinyl floor coverings, as well as pesticides.Most testing up to now has been done on animals, and phthalates have been shown to be carcinogenic and to cause fetal deformity and death, as well as reproductive toxicity (in women, toxemia is a condition of pregnancy where the presence of the baby is actually poisonous to the mother). The recent study is alarming because it reflects the results of the animal testing, but in most cases the levels of the phthalates in the baby boys and their mothers was at a lower percentage than in the comparable lab mice, yet the results were as dramatic.Lawmakers in California and New York are already looking into banning the phthalates indicated in the studies. Meanwhile, the best advice from one of the authors of the study, Christine Ternand, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Minnesota, was for pregnant women to avoid phthalates as much as possible -- a feat that the doctor admitted would not be a simple one, considering that phthalates are also in the air and soil.Another study shows that chemicals found in common pesticides mimic female hormones when ingested and consequently reduce male sperm count. Since the end of World War II, scientists have been studying the effects of chemical pesticides on both human and animal populations, and their findings are disturbing.Southern California sea gulls are losing their interest in breeding. Male sea gulls are apathetic, and female sea gulls try to nest together. The more pollutants in their bodies, the more they tend to exhibit this unusual behavior.In Central Florida, male alligators hatching in Lake Apopka have penises only one quarter the normal size, and their low testosterone levels almost guarantee sterility. The pesticide at the root of the alligators’ problem is dicofol, whic Fantasy baseball would not have becomes popular without technology. Computers and the internet ushered in this sports revolution. The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of in-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated Selecting The Perfect Online Home Based Business Opportunity With the baseball season in full swing, it's time to remember how geeks and technology have transformed the game of baseball. Over the past three decades, the internet, medical advances, and the globalization media have fundamentally transformed how fans consume baseball and how ballplayers play America's pastime. Below is a survey of some of the ways technology has effected baseball, and some ideas on how some new technologies will continue to affect baseball.Today, many people are taking advantage of the flexible work and turning to online home based business opportunities which means there is plenty of scope and choice for those who want to start an online home based business. One of the first steps towards having success with an online home based business is making sure you have a good home computer with internet access. However, it can then be difficult choosing between the profusion of opportunities available for those wanting to start an online home based business. More often than not, it's a matter of finding a business that fits you. All of the online home based businesses will be profitable as long as you put in the work. So how can you determine which online home based business is best for you?First, you should clarify where your interests lie. While an online home based business can be fun, it can bore you to tears if it holds no interest for you. If you have a family or young children, perhaps you would prefer not to have to meet clients, or to work during the day time. Make sure your management and time plan for your preferred online home based business is compatible with your family schedule.Are you prepared to learn new skills? Interesting opportunities are in abundance on the computer that you may be interested in doing, but without the necessary skills you may not be able to do the work. However, the flexibility of online courses allows for their inclusion, without having a conflict with your work schedule and family schedule. It may also be opportune to follow this trend of online learning and start marketing educational products with a large market and growth potential for your online home based business.In addition, consider the company you are going associate, or partner with. Most of the companies that offer home based opportunities will want a payment of some kind. These payments vary and it is important to determine the company's standard of honesty and integrity, as well as their performance to date, before starting your online home based business with them. Check the testimonials and where possible, talk with others who have already worked with the company you are looking to work for. Baseball, Technology, and Fans 1. Video Games From the beginning, video games have attempted to replicate baseball. In 1971, Don Daglow at Pomona College wrote ''Baseball.'' During the early 1980s, Atari and Mattel also released baseball video games. In 1983, Mattel released Intellivision ''World Series Baseball.'' For the first time, players of ''World Series Baseball'' could use multiple camera angles to show the action. A gamer could see the batter from a modified "center field" camera, see baserunners in corner insets, and view defensive plays from a camera behind home plate. ''World Series Baseball'' also integrated fly balls into their interface. In 1988, baseball video games made another jump, when Electronic Arts (EA) released ''Earl Weaver Baseball'', which added an actual baseball manager provided run by artificial intelligence. The important of ''Earl Weaver Baseball'' was acknowledged by Computer Gaming World in 1996 when it named ''Earl Weaver Baseball'' 25th on its list of the Best 150 Games of All Time. This was the second highest ranking for any sports game in that 1981-1996 period behind FPS Sports Football. Nintendo also hit a homerun, in 1988 when it released ''RBI Baseball.'' RBI was the first video game to be licensed through the Major League Baseball Players Association. The game contained authentic major league players and rosters, and not surprisingly was a huge hit with players. Twenty years after the first baseball video game, ''Tony La Russa Baseball'' appeared on shelves across the country. The game made significant advancements in baseball game play. First, ''La Russa'' included a circular Fly Ball Cursor that appeared where the ball was going to land, and grew or diminished in size based on the height of the ball. If the wind was blowing the cursor would move its location to reflect the changing course of the ball. The Fly Ball Cursor introduced real fly balls and pop-ups to computer baseball games, eliminating the last segment of the sport that had never been simulated accurately. Second, ''La Russa'' allowed users to conduct drafts and set up their own leagues, all with access to the game's comprehensive player statistics. Third, ''La Russa'' was the first baseball game to offer accurate stats for each individual pitcher against each individual hitter, data that actual managers use extensively in the dugout. In contrast to many sports celebrities who merely lent their names to games, Tony La Russa spent extensive sessions over a period of years working to make the game's artificial intelligence as accurate as possible. The quality of baseball games has continued to develop since ''La Russa.'' The development of EA's ''MVP Baseball'', Sony's ''MLB The Show'', Out of the Park Developments' text-based simulation ''Out of the Park Baseball'', and the and growth of gaming systems (from Genesis to XBox360) has transformed the depth and reality of baseball games. Even players themselves admit to using them prepare for games. According to an FHM article written by 2004 AL Cy Young Winner Johan Santana (April 2006 pg. 113), "I can see the hitting zones of each player and statistically where he doesn't like the ball. I can also get a feel for when he will swing at fastballs and when he may not expect a change-up. I wouldn't say that I would pitch to a guy in a real-life game the same way, but it gives you ideas of how to approach certain hitters." 2. Internet Fantasy Baseball Hate it (girlfriends, wives) or love it (practically every baseball fan), fantasy baseball has become as popular as the sport itself. Once regulated to stat junkies who painfully calculated and managed everything on their own, the expansion of the internet has allowed millions of fans to participate in leagues with friends and other fans throughout the country. This couldn't possibly affect the actual sport itself right? Wrong. Fantasy Baseball has a huge impact on fan interest. Did your team throw in the towel mid-season, or currently in an unwatchable rebuilding year? That’s OK. You can still follow your fantasy team and can continue to watch games involving your players via the MLB Baseball Cable Package. Major League Baseball is a product, and anything that allows your customers to constantly read, write, and talk (thus promoting) about your product in a passionate way becomes important. Fantasy baseball would not have becomes popular without technology. Computers and the internet ushered in this sports revolution. The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of in-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated Real Estate Marketing Online - Search Engine Tips for Agents d Series Baseball'' also integrated fly balls into their interface.Spend some time in a real estate marketing forum online, and you'll soon discover that search engines top the list of hot topics.Every agent wants his or her website to rank high in the search engines, and rightfully so. But with so much information (and misinformation) out there, the path to success can be hard to follow. This article will help you navigate.Five steps to better search engine rankings:Step 1 - Choose Your Key Phrases The first step in any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is to determine your key phrases. Key phrases are those words and phrases you want your website to be found for in the search engines. For example, if you're a real estate agent in Smithville, Texas, one of your key phrases might be "Smithville Texas real estate."Don't choose your key phrases based on a hunch. Research them. Find out how many people are searching which phrases. Overture (a Yahoo company) has a key phrase research tool you can use for free. It's located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/.If you really want to get scientific, you can sign up with WordTracker. It's not free like the Overture tool, but it's much more thorough. It includes all of the major search engines with its results.Step 2 - Evaluate Your Infrastructure This section will step *briefly* into the technical weeds. Even if you don't fully understand this information, you will benefit from it. If you hire a web designer, for example, you'll be able to speak intelligently about your search engine aspirations.A website with clean, properly structured HTML (web code) will have greater search engine visibility than a site with complex, poorly structured HTML code.Search engines rank your website on its content (among other things). The more complicated your website's HTML code, the harder it is for search engines to find what they want … your content. That's the importance of having clean "lightweight" coding on all your pages.Burying your site's content under mounds of Javascript, table tags and graphics will only reduce your SEO success.You can avoid these things by hiring a professional designer, and telling him or her you want a properly built website that's primed for SEO.Step 3 - Create Quality Content (And Plenty of It) Even if you do everything else right, your site will rank low if it lacks quality content. Search engines love content. It's one of the ways they validate genuine websites from "spam" websites.Revisit your list In 1988, baseball video games made another jump, when Electronic Arts (EA) released ''Earl Weaver Baseball'', which added an actual baseball manager provided run by artificial intelligence. The important of ''Earl Weaver Baseball'' was acknowledged by Computer Gaming World in 1996 when it named ''Earl Weaver Baseball'' 25th on its list of the Best 150 Games of All Time. This was the second highest ranking for any sports game in that 1981-1996 period behind FPS Sports Football. Nintendo also hit a homerun, in 1988 when it released ''RBI Baseball.'' RBI was the first video game to be licensed through the Major League Baseball Players Association. The game contained authentic major league players and rosters, and not surprisingly was a huge hit with players. Twenty years after the first baseball video game, ''Tony La Russa Baseball'' appeared on shelves across the country. The game made significant advancements in baseball game play. First, ''La Russa'' included a circular Fly Ball Cursor that appeared where the ball was going to land, and grew or diminished in size based on the height of the ball. If the wind was blowing the cursor would move its location to reflect the changing course of the ball. The Fly Ball Cursor introduced real fly balls and pop-ups to computer baseball games, eliminating the last segment of the sport that had never been simulated accurately. Second, ''La Russa'' allowed users to conduct drafts and set up their own leagues, all with access to the game's comprehensive player statistics. Third, ''La Russa'' was the first baseball game to offer accurate stats for each individual pitcher against each individual hitter, data that actual managers use extensively in the dugout. In contrast to many sports celebrities who merely lent their names to games, Tony La Russa spent extensive sessions over a period of years working to make the game's artificial intelligence as accurate as possible. The quality of baseball games has continued to develop since ''La Russa.'' The development of EA's ''MVP Baseball'', Sony's ''MLB The Show'', Out of the Park Developments' text-based simulation ''Out of the Park Baseball'', and the and growth of gaming systems (from Genesis to XBox360) has transformed the depth and reality of baseball games. Even players themselves admit to using them prepare for games. According to an FHM article written by 2004 AL Cy Young Winner Johan Santana (April 2006 pg. 113), "I can see the hitting zones of each player and statistically where he doesn't like the ball. I can also get a feel for when he will swing at fastballs and when he may not expect a change-up. I wouldn't say that I would pitch to a guy in a real-life game the same way, but it gives you ideas of how to approach certain hitters." 2. Internet Fantasy Baseball Hate it (girlfriends, wives) or love it (practically every baseball fan), fantasy baseball has become as popular as the sport itself. Once regulated to stat junkies who painfully calculated and managed everything on their own, the expansion of the internet has allowed millions of fans to participate in leagues with friends and other fans throughout the country. This couldn't possibly affect the actual sport itself right? Wrong. Fantasy Baseball has a huge impact on fan interest. Did your team throw in the towel mid-season, or currently in an unwatchable rebuilding year? That’s OK. You can still follow your fantasy team and can continue to watch games involving your players via the MLB Baseball Cable Package. Major League Baseball is a product, and anything that allows your customers to constantly read, write, and talk (thus promoting) about your product in a passionate way becomes important. Fantasy baseball would not have becomes popular without technology. Computers and the internet ushered in this sports revolution. The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of in-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated Stopping Smoking Without Any Tricks Or Gimmicks l Cursor that appeared where the ball was going to land, and grew or diminished in size based on the height of the ball. If the wind was blowing the cursor would move its location to reflect the changing course of the ball. The Fly Ball Cursor introduced real fly balls and pop-ups to computer baseball games, eliminating the last segment of the sport that had never been simulated accurately. Second, ''La Russa'' allowed users to conduct drafts and set up their own leagues, all with access to the game's comprehensive player statistics. Third, ''La Russa'' was the first baseball game to offer accurate stats for each individual pitcher against each individual hitter, data that actual managers use extensively in the dugout. In contrast to many sports celebrities who merely lent their names to games, Tony La Russa spent extensive sessions over a period of years working to make the game's artificial intelligence as accurate as possible.According to most pharmacists, there are not too many free stop-smoking aids available, except through private philanthropist groups or the medical companies themselves. Counselors, private doctors and clinics sometimes give away free samples on a temporary basis to needy clients if they are available at the time, but usually they are not available on a steady enough basis, depending on the drug.One example is the Pfizer Company who has just released a new drug similar to the stop smoking drug Zyban by Glaxo, called "Chantix", and has donated more medicines to patients than any other pharmaceutical company there was last year. However, all low-income and elderly patients who are under Medicare Part D are unable to get any free medications through any of the drug companies' tax-deductible charities, known as patient-assistance programs.The three companies who are still giving free medication needy people with no insurance coverage or are not signed up through Medicare Part D are: Pfizer Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.; and Merck & Co. Inc. The Bristol-Myers Squibb donated over $500 million worth of drugs to 1 million people in 2005.A private company organized and ran by volunteers, called the Medical Discounts International (MDI), has a list of basic requirements that are needed for medical assistance. Last year alone they helped more than 7.6 million patients fill more than 11 million prescriptions, costing approximately $2.3 billion dollars. The basic requirements are:* The applicant is required to be a US citizen* There are no insurance coverage for outpatient prescription drugs* There needs to be a physician to sign a form or call the drug company on behalf of the applicant* The applicant does not qualify for a government or third party program which provides for prescription drugs* The income level is considered a hardship level, requiring the applicant to purchase the drugs at a retail rate* Income requirements:Less than $1,500 per month per individual, or $2,000 per month per familyEach medication requires an income criteria that varies from below poverty to $60,000 (the higher income levels are MS, AIDS, transplant or cancer patients) who require very expensive drugs and medical maintenanceOther methods than can be utilized for the smokers to help with withdrawal is to learn how to cope with no medical help. The smokers can use other help area to learn the different ways available to stop smoking. One of the alternative methods is to j The quality of baseball games has continued to develop since ''La Russa.'' The development of EA's ''MVP Baseball'', Sony's ''MLB The Show'', Out of the Park Developments' text-based simulation ''Out of the Park Baseball'', and the and growth of gaming systems (from Genesis to XBox360) has transformed the depth and reality of baseball games. Even players themselves admit to using them prepare for games. According to an FHM article written by 2004 AL Cy Young Winner Johan Santana (April 2006 pg. 113), "I can see the hitting zones of each player and statistically where he doesn't like the ball. I can also get a feel for when he will swing at fastballs and when he may not expect a change-up. I wouldn't say that I would pitch to a guy in a real-life game the same way, but it gives you ideas of how to approach certain hitters." 2. Internet Fantasy Baseball Hate it (girlfriends, wives) or love it (practically every baseball fan), fantasy baseball has become as popular as the sport itself. Once regulated to stat junkies who painfully calculated and managed everything on their own, the expansion of the internet has allowed millions of fans to participate in leagues with friends and other fans throughout the country. This couldn't possibly affect the actual sport itself right? Wrong. Fantasy Baseball has a huge impact on fan interest. Did your team throw in the towel mid-season, or currently in an unwatchable rebuilding year? That’s OK. You can still follow your fantasy team and can continue to watch games involving your players via the MLB Baseball Cable Package. Major League Baseball is a product, and anything that allows your customers to constantly read, write, and talk (thus promoting) about your product in a passionate way becomes important. Fantasy baseball would not have becomes popular without technology. Computers and the internet ushered in this sports revolution. The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of in-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated 3 Reasons to Hire a Property Management Company to Run Your Real Estate Investment Property The Show'', Out of the Park Developments' text-based simulation ''Out of the Park Baseball'', and the and growth of gaming systems (from Genesis to XBox360) has transformed the depth and reality of baseball games. Even players themselves admit to using them prepare for games. According to an FHM article written by 2004 AL Cy Young Winner Johan Santana (April 2006 pg. 113), "I can see the hitting zones of each player and statistically where he doesn't like the ball. I can also get a feel for when he will swing at fastballs and when he may not expect a change-up. I wouldn't say that I would pitch to a guy in a real-life game the same way, but it gives you ideas of how to approach certain hitters."Real Estate Investment sounds like a cool thing to do during the weekend but the problem arises when you start having to many properties to handle. The solution to your real estate investment problem would be to hire a property manager who can then run your property for you and deal with any problems that may arise. The key is to get a reliable person who can then do any repairs or maintenance work for you.This article will highlight three additional reasons why you might want to hire a property management company to look after your real estate investment property for you.Firstly, you might be a busy professional or business person during the weekdays and you do not want to run around looking for a plumber or roof repairer sometime during the week. Time is valuable also if you have several properties that you own and it does not make sense to baby sit your properties.Thus you would do well to remember that your monthly income is dependent on the number of deals that you can find to add to your real estate investment portfolio. Get your focus right and you will make more money from your real estate investments.Secondly, proximity is a key issue. One real estate investment author states that he does not own property unless it is within one mile from his own residence. If you want to look after your own properties it is fine but you must be able to go down and take a look if there is any issue arising from your properties.Note that returns from both offshore rentals and capital appreciation currently in places like Dubai might prove more lucrative so if you are looking into offshore real estate investment, hiring a property management company is a must. Similarly, if you are looking at investing in property outside the state that you reside in, it will be necessary for you to hire a property management company to look after your property.Thirdly, if you are new to the type of property class, you might want to consider employing the services of a property management company. For example if you have been involved in residential real estate for a long time and you decide to expand to commercial real estate, you might not be familiar with the documentation, the procedures and the possible problems that may arise from such real estate. Hiring a property management company therefore may help you solve some of your transition problems and like mentioned earlier free you to explore other real estate investments.In conclusion, real estate investment property when done on a small scale in your 2. Internet Fantasy Baseball Hate it (girlfriends, wives) or love it (practically every baseball fan), fantasy baseball has become as popular as the sport itself. Once regulated to stat junkies who painfully calculated and managed everything on their own, the expansion of the internet has allowed millions of fans to participate in leagues with friends and other fans throughout the country. This couldn't possibly affect the actual sport itself right? Wrong. Fantasy Baseball has a huge impact on fan interest. Did your team throw in the towel mid-season, or currently in an unwatchable rebuilding year? That’s OK. You can still follow your fantasy team and can continue to watch games involving your players via the MLB Baseball Cable Package. Major League Baseball is a product, and anything that allows your customers to constantly read, write, and talk (thus promoting) about your product in a passionate way becomes important. Fantasy baseball would not have becomes popular without technology. Computers and the internet ushered in this sports revolution. The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of in-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated Gain PR Attention Using Contests, Awards, and Surveys er fans throughout the country. This couldn't possibly affect the actual sport itself right? Wrong. Fantasy Baseball has a huge impact on fan interest. Did your team throw in the towel mid-season, or currently in an unwatchable rebuilding year? That’s OK. You can still follow your fantasy team and can continue to watch games involving your players via the MLB Baseball Cable Package. Major League Baseball is a product, and anything that allows your customers to constantly read, write, and talk (thus promoting) about your product in a passionate way becomes important.While mass marketers often run games and contests on a nationwide scale, small business can't afford this kind of promotion. But what we lack in money, we can make up for in moxie. Let's examine some other industries to discover what they have done. Hopefully, this will trigger some ideas for you.Holding ContestsTexas is the birthplace of a lot of big ideas. The first Living Legends Classic, an annual bodybuilding competition, was held in Warton, Texas. What an ideal contest for a gym to sponsor. And you might know a Texas bank, TransFirst, came up with a sweepstakes idea to encourage customers to use its Moneymaker automatic teller machines (ATMs). A joint promotion with a local radio station and 7-Eleven stores, where the machines were placed, made the costs affordable. Sweepstake numbers appeared on each Moneymaker ATM transaction slip. A whopping 2.5 million entries resulted.On a smaller scale, one Halloween a market placed a giant pumpkin in its window and offered cash prizes to the person who guessed closest to the number of seeds inside the pumpkin. The contest drew thousands of entries—and sold an unprecedented number of pumpkins. Experimenters counted the seeds, seeking clues to aid in the guesstimating. Could you mold this concept to fit your operation in some way?Restaurants are famous for the fishbowl inviting customers to leave a business card for a drawing on a free meal. In return the restaurant gets a mailing list of their customers and a ready database to solicit for parties and meetings. Apply this concept to trade show exhibits and book festivals.Do be aware contests could dump you into legal hot water. Most states have laws regulating contests and declaring lotteries illegal unless they are sponsored by the government or a charity. The Federal Trade Commission also monitors some contests, as does the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Postal Service. You may want to check with an attorney before embarking on a journey into this highly regulated jungle.Contests are limited primarily by our imagination. What can you do to delight someone else and get free promotion for yourself? Just be sure your contest is relevant to your business. A beauty shop might give a free shampoo and style to the woman with the longest hair; a church could award their longest-standing member a token gift. An insurance agent could honor the driver with the longest safe-driving/no-ticket record. How about a travel agent giving the customer who has logged the most miles in a year a free trip t Fantasy baseball would not have becomes popular without technology. Computers and the internet ushered in this sports revolution. The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy baseball, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and allowing leagues to develop their own scoring system, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, fantasy baseball has become a sort of in-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. According to a recent Fortune article, the "American male's obsession with sports is nothing new, but try this on for size: More than half of fantasy sports fanatics spend over an hour a day just thinking about their teams." Fantasy baseball is a ''billion dollar industry.'' However, Much like the RIAA and MPAA, Major League Baseball is putting clamps on the fantasy technology that fueled professional baseball's rebirth after the 1996 strike. MLB has decided to dramatically restructure how it licenses companies that run fantasy games on the Web. Official licensees will now likely be restricted to a Big Three of ESPN, CBS Sportsline, and Yahoo! (some reports add AOL and The Sporting News as well). "Mom and pop" shops that helped usher the fantasy baseball phenomenon into existence will be severely limited by the licensing deal. They will only be allowed information to service 5,000 customers apiece. Everyone else using baseball statistics to run small fantasy leagues will have to choose between scaling back their operations, closing up shop, or receiving a visit from MLB's lawyers. 3. User Created Media Before the internet, media creation was limited to professionals. Newspapers, radio, television, and niche sports magazines like Sports Illustrated possessed a virtual stranglehold over the dissemination of sports news and information. The first user created sports media occurred with the advent of Sports Talk radio. An extension of talk radio, which has existed since the 1940s, sports talk radio took off in the early 1980s. Today, over 30 major sports talk radio stations exist throughout the country. Sports talk radio provided fans a soapbox to voice their complaints, thoughts, and analysis of sports. However, instead of ranting only to their friends and family, sports talk radio gave fans the ability to transmit their ideas to a potentially large audience. Wanting a voice, sports fans used technology to disseminate their ideas over the internet. The first of these technologies was sports messageboard communities. While sports messageboards have never reached mainstream popularity, they have a solid presence on the net. A quick search for "baseball messageboards" in Google will return over 8.5 million hits. Internet messageboards also represented the first Petri dish for user-created media. This sentiment is best exemplified by a scandal that occurred at the beginning of the 2000 season. Bobby Valentine, then the New York Mets manager, gave a lecture at the Wharton School of Business -- an "off-the-record" talk. But "off-the-record" is only a term relevant to journalists. While the ''Daily Pennsylvanian'' (Penn's school newspaper), gave a perfunctory mention to the speech, one student-attendee went much further. Brad Rosenberg, using the username brad34, logged onto a Mets message board and claimed that Bobby V blasted some players and management. The mainstream media ran with it; then-general manager Steve Phillips hopped on a plane to Pittsburgh to pow-wow with Valentine; and minor scandal was in the works. Today, the phenomenon that started on message boards has extended to blogs. Over the past two years, blogs have exploded. Everyone (from grandmas to infants) are starting their own blogs, and not surprisingly a number of these blogs talk about sports. Blogs provide individuals with the community of a sports talk radio and potentially infinite world-wide reach. A powerful combination. Today, there are approximately, http://sportsblogs.org/sports.php?subject=Blogs, 1158 baseball blogs floating around the internet. 4. Satellite Television Satellites beam baseball games around the world, fueling global baseball. While the first satellite television signals were relayed in the early 1960s, widespread consumer television reception took off in the 1980s. For the first time, geography did not limit the dissemination of moving pictures. Television's power with no geographic limits translated into new opportunities for major league baseball. By the late 1990s, baseball games could be seamlessly and relatively inexpensively transmitted throughout the globe. This allowed Major League Baseball to reach into foreign labor and commerci
HTTP = HTML link (for blogs, profiles,phorums):
Related Articles:Your Recipe For Online Success Delete Pornography and Remove Pornography Tools Some Of The Things You May Not Know About Botox Injections
|