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]

More Facebook Fun: Pete Carroll’s triumphant return, NCAA brackets and you

Much has happened since Sportsbiztech broke the news that USC football coach Pete Carroll’s profile had been mysteriously removed from the social networking black hole that is Facebook.

(I boldly state “broke the news” based on the not-so-scientific analysis that, after I blogged, a search for Coach’s name and “Facebook” in Google showed nothing but “Coach joined Facebook” types of entries on the first couple of pages with the exception of mine. I’ll delete that reference if related posts in the blogosphere show an earlier timestamp…)

What happened with Coach Carroll’s profile, it turns out, happened to be a Facebook snafu rather than a legal or privacy issue. 2007 alumnus Ben Malcolmson – who corrected me when I erroneously thought he was still a student (sorry, Ben) – clarified the situation in an e-mail. Malcolmson, who maintains Coach’s Facebook page and writes the USCRipsIt blog, said, “The Facebook page was incorrectly disabled but is now back up. Facebook believed it was a false page, but the air has been cleared.”

Interesting! Instead of a case of stolen identity, Facebook denies the REAL identity of the human being who has now amassed, at latest count, 2,481 friends. (When I joined two weeks ago, I was somewhere in the mid-900s.)

Malcolmson goes on to say that “USC does not have an official policy for its athletes, though many coaches urge their own players to not use Facebook too extensively, if at all. The issues that arise from photos from a party or the like can only mean problems for a student-athlete representing a university, especially an underage student-athlete.”

So, case closed on that puzzling occurrence, and thanks to Ben for clearing the air. Now folks are treated to Coach Carroll’s updates once again, including his latest that reads:

“Pete Carroll is thinking…”BEAT THE WILDCATS.”"

This brings me to the second part of my post. Coach Carroll is referring to USC’s first-round opponent, Kansas State, in the NCAA Tournament. That’s right, it’s time for March Madness, where (mostly) American college basketball fans go crazy filling out brackets, trying to figure out whether to go with underdogs or the top seeds for their Final Four. My bracket was a breeze thanks to CBS Sports’ official application on Facebook, which you can go to at http://apps.facebook.com/cbssports. Never was filling out a bracket so simple – no pencils or unwanted advice needed – and I can follow my friends’ picks online. Unfortunately for Coach, I didn’t pick USC, whose squad will soon include rapper Lil’ Romeo. I was boring and chose a front-runner. Hint: Change one letter in USC’s acronym.

And the “You” portion of this post’s headline? Well, I’d encourage YOU to follow my lead in creating a bracket, but a report published in the Chicago Tribune last week states that the FBI has actually looked into the CBS Sports/Facebook partnership. That’s because in the U.S., Internet gaming is illegal. The article cites all sorts of reactions from Vegas online gaming lawyers to CBS execs to even the European Union.

So much for avoiding the law in this post. YOU, then, have two options: Move to Europe, or just become a March Madness commentator on YouCastr.

Whither Pete Carroll, oh Former Facebook Friend?

Sadly, this day has come. That’s right, today marks the day when a horrified Sportsbiztech scribe has discovered that my total number of Facebook friends has decreased by one. And my guess as to who the culprit was proved to be correct: USC football coach Pete Carroll.

You see, Coach Carroll started a Facebook page last month. Soon, hundreds of Facebookers from students to alums to curious folks like me asked to be his friend. Now suddenly, overnight, all mentions of Coach have been removed from my news feeds. I was about to take this personally — perhaps I had been discovered, since I did not attend USC and have never lived in California! — until I realized that search results for his name no longer put his name and picture at the top of the list, or anywhere on it. The URL to his profile now just redirects to www.facebook.com. It’s a shame because I genuinely did want to receive updates on Coach’s “A Better L.A.” cause and his thoughts on March Madness, which he expressed some excitement about just yesterday.

So what exactly happened? Did Coach run into some of the same privacy and security issues that I mentioned in one of my previous blog entries? It will be interesting to find out…

Mar. 15 update: I have contacted USC’s football department as well as the student who maintained Coach Carroll’s Facebook page. If I hear anything, you’ll read it here first…

Mar. 18 update: Still no word from either USC or the student, perhaps because the school is currently on spring break.

Mar. 18 update No. 2: HE’S BACK!  Just as mysterious as his disappearance, Coach Carroll is now back on Facebook and loving March Madness (according to his status message).  But why the abbreviated Spring Break, Coach?

Get out of my Facebook, unless you’re Pete Carroll

Facebook, described on its very own site as “a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them,” is crawling with all types of people. Surely, Sportsbiztech mused, one of these types includes sports figures?

A Google search for various combinations of the words “athletes,” “sports,” “Facebook” and “official” did not reveal of a list of known names or profiles. Instead, the results were a bit more alarming, with the majority of content involving issues such as security, harassment and other concerns, particularly at the collegiate level.

While student-athletes can create online fan communities by adding “friends” whom they have never met, they have to be equally wary of posting contact information or pictures that can leak their way into a public forum, especially if the leaking is done by students at rival schools. (A hypothetical example: Athlete/student who is a minor goes to a party, is photographed downing a pint of beer and posts picture on Facebook. Rival fan enlarges said picture, mounts it on a poster board and brings it to the next game to publicly taunt said athlete/student/minor.) Coaches and university officials are concerned that, even though Facebook is behind a registration firewall, merely having a profile page would make create far too many opportunities for a student-athlete to damage his or her reputation, as well as that of the school’s. Some schools, like Florida State and Kentucky, have banned their athletes from having Facebook profiles.

Even Bill Gates, though not an athlete at last check but the Champion of Microsoft, had to shut his Facebook account down a few weeks ago, although not due to security reasons. (Receiving more than 8,000 friend requests a day was apparently too much for him to handle. Word has it that he has shifted his sights to LinkedIn. )

That doesn’t mean that everyone is steering clear of Facebook. USC football coach Pete Carroll recently created a page, according to the Los Angeles Times. While one of his interests is “coaching,” another is “playing basketball.” Hmmm.

Mar. 6 update: On his Facebook page, Pete Carroll posts notes and promotes his “A Better L.A.” cause. (He also likes Kanye West, by the way.) Thanks to one of his Facebook friends for posting the link to this blog entry on his profile. Underneath that post, a reporter from Sports Illustrated requested a wall-to-wall interview with Coach Carroll…who actually responded!