This is the third of a three-part series sponsored by Samsung that covers the evolution of technology and sports.  In this final installment (part three of only three parts!), I will look how technology, in its attempt to enhance our sports-enjoying experience, has allowed us to see the man behind the curtain.

There is an overblown war of words between bloggers and mainstream journalists.  From the blogger front, you often hear about the arrogance and dinosaurish ways of the media and how they're surviving on an obsolete business model.  From the media side, you hear about how bloggers are untrained, uncouth, and generally without the access needed to get to the information first-hand.  It's become quieter recently, a bit more like the Korean DMZ where there occasional incidents but nothing to get significantly worked up about, but it was a contest long coming since the budding age of the BBS and theme-based forum discussion.  Things got interactive, and then we all got pretty involved.

The seminal moment in the shift in technology happened to be a major, major win for bloggers.  It's not that the bloggers won that round that was important, though; it was that the new technology blitzkrieged the old business model to the point where one of the most respected figures in the business lost his job.  Most of you remember the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) memo fiasco during the 2004 presidential elections, where Killian Kinko'd a hastily-written memo that was supposed to portray Bush as a Vietnam war dodger thanks to daddy's influence.  Dan Rather ran the breaking news, complete with revelation of the documents.  CBS, attempting to use the internet to stay out on the leading edge of the story, released pdf versions of the documents during the broadcast.  While the broadcast was still airing, a blog called Little Green Footballs not only figured out that the memo was a fake, but what program was used to create the memo and how it was distorted.  (It didn't hurt that Killian was too lazy to switch from Times New Roman.)  The entire story is here and is a fascinating read for the purposes of technological evolutionary history.

Now, we're not a political site and the politics behind that story aren't the purpose of this post at all.  But LGF's end-around proved one thing: the old media no longer had exclusivity on the narrative of a story.  In fact, it appears that nobody rightly controls the narrative any more.  Moving back to sports...

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This is the second in a three-part series sponsored by Samsung that covers the evolution of technology and sports.  In this phase, I will look at the changes in information accessibility, presentation, and management.

Let's start with an example:

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This post is part of a series sponsored by Samsung detailing the evolution of technology and sports.  The title of this post is an homage to our current website tagline (see above).  The first?  Some things will never be replaced by technology.

I'm cheap.  It's easier being cheap when you're a college student, true, but it's a part of who I am nonetheless.

I'm cheap enough that I have yet to willingly pay for cable TV, despite being 34 years old.  When I went to college, cable was a part of the dorm package; when I moved into my first apartment, cable was a part of the rent.  I don't count those.  My second apartment, however, was cable-optional, whereupon I went out and bought a pair of $15 rabbit ears, extending my channel reach to the broadcast networks and giving me enough to catch basic news and sports.  I really didn't have any interest in more TV; that was the late 90s and this whole 'internet' thing was taking over enough of my time.

Which takes us to today.  By the time the federal government finally got around to letting old-school broadcasts die, broadband internet had already evolved to the point where it was better than the rabbit ears I had grown accustomed to.  So nowadays, I get my feed via new media: usually a six-inch wide window on my ESPN3 player.  It's been enough to watch a full day's worth of games, flip channels, and generally get as overloaded on Saturday football as I could with any game package on the old box.  And while some people might think I'm cheaping out the system by watching on the same service I'd have for email, I couldn't disagree more.  Internet technology is one of the best things to happen to expanding the market reach of sports.

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