I know a lot of baseball sites run “open game threads”, where people watching/listening to the game can have immediate responses about what’s going on. I toyed with that a year ago, and decided against it – I don’t think I have enough of a following to pull that off. Having just a couple of posts in an “open thread” for a game is pretty sad.
Anyway, something that’s become more prevalent the last couple of years is sports game blogging. I’ve seen a lot of newspapers sports blogs do that kind of thing. Now for the most part it’s not individual play by play level of blogging (that’s what the aforementioned open threads tend to do), but there are generally a lot of reports from games anymore. I always wondered what the various leagues thought of that type of thing, as a lot of them (Hello NFL, and a wink to MLB) tend to frown on almost anything that they don’t control themselves.
To that I read this article tonight saying the NCAA wigged out and told people to stop liveblogging their games. At one point, they actually ejected someone from the stadium, and revoked their credentials. That seems a bit bizarre to me, even with some of the overly anal things I’ve read about the NFL doing.
It does make me wonder when the leagues might take a stance against that kind of thing. The article mentions the ejected guy’s lawyer arguing against the concept, claiming that it was commentary, not a simulcast, which would probably be in violation of something, although I’m no expert.
It probably won’t actually come to pass, but the concept of a league deciding that liveblogging is something to be stopped can’t be completely ignored, either. Go read the article, some nice food for thought.