There’s a lot of stuff on the internet. Apparently Google CEO (soon-to-be ex-CEO) Eric Schmidt once said 5 million terabytes. I have no idea how old that estimate is. And really, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the number is, it’s too big for any of us to really comprehend. The bottom line is that the internet is a very, very, very big place. And much of the information on it is fascinating, entertaining, informative, or just plain time-suckingly captivating.
Now, how do we find the good stuff on the internet? By and large, we rely (in some form or another) upon other people to point us in the direction of stuff worth looking at. A friend posts a link on twitter or Facebook. A user posts a video response to a youtube video. Writers (everyone from big-name newspaper columnists to lowly bloggers) mention blogs or articles. Even Google is basically just an algorithm spitting out results based on what people are linking to.
The great thing about the internet is that just about any intelligent creative output a human being can create ends up there in some form or another. Music, movies, essays, stories, whatever—almost all of it is out there somewhere online, free or not, legal or not. The bad thing about the internet is that most people are stupid. So they point you to crap like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, which has blown up twitter and youtube and everything else for the past week or so. Continue reading ‘when crap goes viral’
If you follow sports you’ve probably heard that the NFL owners and players are arguing with each other. Each side wants a bigger share of the billions of dollars in revenue the league generates. The owners want more money; the players want more information about the teams’ finances; and to put it in clichéd terms, it’s billionaires fighting millionaires. Do they really think it’s a good idea to complain about their share of a gigantic financial pie when unemployment has been above 9% for the past two years? Apparently, they do. Now, people aren’t going to care too much if the season starts on schedule. If this debacle is out of the way by July, no big deal. But if this gets close to the start of the season, if it affects any games or comes very close to doing so, the NFL is playing with fire.
Right now the league dominates the American sports scene. I admit I’m a little bit biased, living in the football-mad South and Saints-crazed New Orleans, but the NFL is clearly the biggest of the Big Four North American sports leagues. The league is doing incredibly well on TV, and even in the recent economic downturn the vast majority of NFL teams routinely sell out their stadia for every game. It would be incredibly stupid for the teams and players to risk a nightmare along the lines of the 1994-95 MLB strike. That ruined baseball for years; it only made a decent comeback after the long-ball era and home run chases of the late 90s and early 2000s, an era that we now know was tainted by steroid use. I’m sure the teams and players of MLB must have cost themselves a ton of money due to the game’s decreased popularity. Why should the NFL take that risk? It’s in a great position right now. That doesn’t mean it’ll automatically always be the biggest league in the US, but a strike could certainly have damaging short and long term effects. What if a league such as the UFL makes a push for expansion and increased popularity during a lockout or strike, then tries to stick around? What if people decide they’d rather just watch college football, knowing that teams can’t threaten to relocate and there are no strikes or lockouts? Continue reading ‘the nfl labor dispute’