Take Me Out to the Nats Game

As a native Washingtonian, I grew up accepting the fact that the Baltimore Orioles were going to be as close to a “home” team as I would get. This reality more than sufficed when Cal Ripken, Jr., was playing, but after the Iron Man retired, the Inner Harbor suddenly seemed to be in a galaxy far, far away.

Now Washington, D.C., has the Nationals – thanks to the Montreal Expos – and its own stadium. Opening Day is Sunday, but attendees at the Sports Events Marketing Experience Conference being held in D.C. were the first ones treated to a tour and a peek of the team’s batting practice at the new US$611 million Nationals Park. Located in a part of the Nation’s Capital that I’d previously never be caught dead in (i.e., anywhere with an address other than NW), the area is quickly being revitalized and is scheduled to look very different in three years’ time. (Go to halfstreet.com and you’ll see what is in store.)

Of course, no modern-day stadium would be complete without technology, although parents buying tickets for their kids had better watch out for the souped-up section for kids bored of trying to figure out how many outs are left in a game. This area includes a playground, a “Build-A-Bear Workshop” store and…a Sony PlayStation pavilion. Yes, Sony inked a deal with the Nationals, and here’s what the pavilion looked like as it was still being put together:

So instead of paying for a ticket to go watch the game, you can pay for a ticket to go play…Gran Turismo 5 on a Sony flatscreen.

However, Sony was not responsible for providing the huge video display in the park. Those honors went to Mitsubishi Electric, whose Diamond Vision LED display is quite a sight:

According to our tour guide, this whopping 1,347-inch diagonal, 4,800 sq. ft. screen is the largest HD video display of any ballpark in the U.S. (the Atlanta Braves’ display is larger but is not in high-definition).

And finally, while this isn’t tech-oriented, I just can’t get over the cheesy, politically-themed names for the concession stands. This is probably the worst offender:

What’s in a name?

At the recently-concluded Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in New York, I stopped by the kiosk for Dozier Internet Law and asked a couple of the lawyers there to tell me what some of the most pressing issues were concerning sports, technology and the law. They immediately said online identity theft, particularly when it came to reusing images and swiping names for URLs.

The latter sounded particularly appealing to investigate. Surely there have been some stories of crazed fans, crazed fans and even more crazed fans snapping up URLs not with the intention of building Web sites, but to eventually profit from a trademark that belongs to someone else by selling said URL to that same someone else. It’s a practice called “cybersquatting,” and for athletes and sports teams, the issue has lingered for years with varied results. Those seeking to reclaim the cyberspace that they think is rightfully theirs can initiate an arbitration proceeding under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy rather than file a lawsuit, which costs more and takes more time to process.

A look into the historical database of proceedings on the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Web site is pretty telling. Everyone and everything from celebrities to companies to movie titles to spelling variations (like deliberate typos) are listed here, complete with rulings. There are way too many sports examples to cite, but here are some from the WIPO database, while others that didn’t make it to proceedings are listed here anyway for sheer entertainment value. You be the judge:

Domain	What happened	Result
Danmarino.com	Dan Marino himself registered the domain but forgot to renew, so someone else snatched up the name.	WIPO ruled in 2000 that the domain be transferred back to Marino.
Giambi.com (last name of baseball players Jason and Jeremy Giambi)	The Giambis said that their surname alone was famous enough. The brothers also complained of being ripped off because they offered $500 for the URL but Tom Meagher, who registered it, wanted $12,000. (And you make HOW much?)	WIPO ruled in favor of Meagher, stating he bought the domain first, so he could do as he wished with it. (Also, neither of the brothers’ first names appeared in the URL, which reportedly may have played a role in the ruling.)
JaapStam.com	Oliver Cohen, then affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, had been the one identified as the registrar when the complaint was filed in 2000.	WIPO ruled that the domain be transferred to the former Dutch international and Manchester United soccer player.
JacksonvilleJaguars.com	Rusty Rahe, who bought the domain, also purchased a number of other URLs containing the names of four other NFL teams in 1997. One of the reasons stated for doing so? He said “that his use of the Domain Names was for noncommercial education of his children Jordan (age 10) and Alexa (age 8).”	WIPO ruled that all URLs be transferred to their respective teams, then closed with the following: “The Presiding Panelist also encourages Respondent’s children Jordan and Alexa to continue using and learning about the Internet. Dispute resolution is a common and necessary part of using the Internet. The transfer of the Domain Names to Complainants should not discourage Jordan and Alexa from choosing other domain names unrelated to Complainants and participating in this wonderful, new world of information sharing.” Wow.
Marianorivera.com	SFX, which represents the Yankees reliever, wrote a letter to the Webmaster in July 2007. Unlike other cases, this isn’t a situation of cybersquatting – a fan actually does maintain this site, which appears to be devoid of ads.	Still pending. Mar. 25 update: The Webmaster wrote to Sportsbiztech to say that SFX had, in fact, sent the letter to him in error and that he could continue operating as usual.  Read more in the comments below…
Michaeljordan.org	Previously owned by the Progressive Universal Life Church, who let the domain expire in March 2004.	But did His Airness buy it? No. The current site is now a spam site with Jordan’s picture on it. Interestingly, .com and .net are not official sites either, as MJ opted for campaign-driven URLs provided by Nike.
Phoenixcoyotes.com	Firm who owned the URL offered to sell it to the pro hockey team for a six-digit amount. They refused to buy it.	When the URL expired, the Coyotes purchased it and it now redirects to coyotes.nhl.com.

Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the database on the WIPO site at http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/cases.html.

News of the week

Sportsbiztech is back with the latest sites and gadgets to hit the cybersphere, saving you trips to the bar, trips to the library, trips to school and trips to your head:

This takes the “couch potato” tag to new levels: The first virtual world for sports fans, Sports Blox, features online bars among other social networking goodies. Who needs to watch sports in a real bar where Yankees and Red Sox fans can’t co-exist in harmony anyway? [www.sportsblox.com]

Sports Illustrated launches “SI Vault,” an incredible online resource spanning the history of sports dating back to magazine’s founding in 1954. Videos, blogs, shared content with other sites like Wikipedia and eBay, 150,000 articles, 2,800 cover images and half a million photos await, although just how comprehensive it really is remains to be seen. For example, a search for “Michael Chang” somehow resulted in zero (!) photos which is a bit difficult to believe given the length of his career. However, his name brings up more than 100 videos pulled from MSN, YouTube and other sources, ranging from his recent Tennis Hall of Fame announcement to his incredible 1989 French Open victory. [vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com]

My dad has a knack for pitching ideas that come to fruition years after the fact. When I was a kid, he said that teachers should find engaging, tangible ways to educate kids about math through the use of sports statistics. But I don’t think he would have guessed that mobile devices would serve as the messenger. The University of Central Florida has developed My Sports Pulse, a service to help K-12 students become engaged math, science and technology through sports-related questions delivered through interactive voice response, text and video messages. The university worked with a number of partners, including professional teams in Orlando and Kansas City, to get the product off the ground, and the Florida Virtual School was just announced as one of the first clients. [www.mysportspulse.com]

The Arena Football League has incorporated a number of interesting changes this season, the most intriguing being the “Shockometer” device developed by Schutt Sports. Attached to a player’s helmet, the device switches from green to red if a player receives a particularly hard hit, signaling doctors to take a look for particularly worrying head injuries like concussions. [San Jose Mercury News]

Don’t let Nike try it (SEO, that is)

This past week I attended the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference & Expo, which is held in a number of cities worldwide every year. The event is full of enthusiastic geeks diving into the minutia that is search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing. In layman’s terms, if you’re working hard on your Web site, you want to make sure that (a) you’re designing and wording it in a way that Google will want index it on its first page in various keyword search results, leading to (b) an increase in the number of eyeballs on your site, hopefully leading to (c) more readers and more business.

Some Web sites do an excellent job of achieving good SEO, but the way to really learn about the subject is to see who out there is not exhibiting a best practice. One particular company that SES panelists like to take potshots at is Nike. (In fact, one of them suggested Wednesday that there be an entire panel devoted to what is wrong with Nike’s Web sites, an idea at which other speakers and attendees laughed in agreement.)

At last year’s AND this year’s SES, various speakers said that while the athletic apparel company’s online properties fare well in branded searches – the “Nike” in the www.nike.com URL certainly helps – they do very poorly for keyword results such as “running shoes.” (In Google, shoe retailer Zappos.com comes out on top for that, and according to WebProNews, a search for the keyword “shoes” gives Zappos 21 percent of the traffic for that word versus just 1 percent for Nike.) There are a number of reasons for this, the first and foremost being that search engines still can’t track Flash applications very well. Nike’s sites abuse Flash to the nth degree, so when Google and Yahoo! capture information to index, they see sites just as you would be looking at them in Lynx. (Oh, the horror. Does anyone else remember the MS DOS-like text on blue screen with [LINK] and [IMAGE] tags? To think I was once forced to surf the Web in this manner.)

So, using a handy online bot spoofer, here is a screenshot of how nike.com looks to the Yahoo! Slurp crawler:

No, I did not create this in Photoshop and paste it here; rather, the “404″ appears to show that bots can’t read images or Flash applications, so the entire Nike front page is a big blank to Yahoo! as well as Google. Now, Nike can probably get away with this since their brand is so well-known, but with more than 6 billion people on this planet, surely at least one person isn’t familiar with the company, so this is no way to draw in new customers. The easy thing to do would be to scrap the fancy Flash and go for a site that is easier on the eye, easier on your connection and easier on Google, right?

Well, Nike didn’t want to do that. When SES speaker Liana “Li” Evans, the director of Internet marketing at KeyRelevance, was going to go into the “Nike Story” at a panel, I was expecting the same song and dance that I just mentioned above. Instead, she retold a sordid tale that WebProNews broke earlier in the year. Nike, in an attempt to trick the search engines, kept constructing Web sites in Flash but fed HTML code to the engines so that keywords could be picked up. In other words, the Nike site that Google’s bots crawled did not resemble the coding in the actual online site, a practice called “cloaking.” Is Nike cheating? The panelists seemed to think so. What do you think?

Even more exclusive than the All-England Club itself

This June, I will embark on an excellent European adventure that will culminate with, hopefully, watching Roger Federer dominate the field at the lone Grand Slam major that I have yet to attend: Wimbledon.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to see crazy fans impersonate their favorite players at the Australian Open, join in the swooping whistles at the French and cover the U.S. Open a number of times as a writer for various publications. So I figured, why not consider attending the All-England’s Club grand event via that last method?

Well, the esteemed grasscourt event is as exclusive as the players’ all-white dress code it enforces. Wimbledon, it turns out, is the only one of the four Grand Slams that explicitly states on its Web site that it does not welcome online journalists. According to its media accreditation rules, the tournament does “not grant accreditation to journalists writing solely for the internet [sic].” Furthermore, if I want more information on the accreditation process itself, I can’t send an e-mail (fittingly). I have to call or fax!

The U.S. Open seems to be the most receptive when it comes to granting credentials to online journos, having stepped up their efforts to include cyber scribes a couple of years ago. The French Open is a bit more ambiguous, saying that press “passes are for written press, radio and television but now also for photographers.” Oh, so they weren’t for photographers before? They do have a special Intranet site for journalists, which is an upgrade from all the photocopied score sheets and press conference transcripts provided at the U.S. Open. It was impossible to find any info on either the Australian Open or Tennis Australia sites, although somehow I doubt that a ban would be in place considering that www.ausopen.org has an entire section highlighting technology at the Australian Open.

The real shame of it is, according to Hitwise UK, online searches for all things tennis — be it “Wimbledon” or “tennis rackets” – spikes when Wimbledon is in session. The company, which measures Internet consumer behavior around the world, does note that while traffic to tennis-related subjects increases during this two-week period, overall the trend is declining year after year. So wouldn’t Wimbledon benefit from a bit of online love?

That’s okay, though. Something tells me that I’ll have more fun queuing and bonding with fans in the early mornings for tickets…in the rain.

On second thought…