Baseball talk over lunch and my afternoon panels

One of the nice things about BlogWorld Expo was getting to chat about baseball with dudes who's blogs I read. At lunch today, which Blez paid for (thank you, Blez), I got the chance to chat with Al from Bleed Cubbie Blue, Matt from MetsBlog and Brandon from Acme Packing Company. Much of the talk was about blogging in general, what with Matt going at it full time, but we also had the chance to compare notes on our readers and what it's like to try to appease all kinds of different personalities. I was telling the guys how we had to constantly keep each other in check when, inevitably, a Gaslamp Baller would feel that all was lost. I told Matt how, no offense, we would say things like, "It sucks, but it's happening to other teams. Look at the Mets." Matt laughed and said he'd used the same reasoning in reverse about the Padres.

The afternoon panels were great and I got to put my computer engineering geek hat back on for a little bit during the "Sports Blogging: Where do we go from here?" panel. I talked (maybe too long) about how cool it would be to have these fully integrated Open Threads where you could tell, at a glance, at one point during the game a comment came in. Or if a comment wasn't completely self descriptive, you could push a button and have a YouTube style player right next to it to figure out what the person was talking about. There's all kinds of stuff that I think leagues could do to really make the experience better for the online user, and it's probably only a matter of time before it really happens. Unfortunately, I don't know that leagues are going to rush to do such things until they figure out how to really monetize them.

Luckily, I figured out how to use my recorder about 5 to 10 minutes into the discussion, so I'll post a transcript by Monday. Just know that I gave a shout out to the 17YOGP, which I think stunned some people for the fact that there is such a thing as the 17YOGP (or GLBGP as I've taken to calling the ladies since I don't want to be an age discriminator).

The keynote was from Mark Cuban and I'll tell you something... Regardless of what you might think of Cuban's personality, he is a really bright guy with a very solid grasp of the realities of social media and business technology. It was honestly refreshing to hear him answer so many questions with such a firm understanding of the business, technical and political aspects of almost any subject thrown at him. I guess that's why he's insanely rich.

More proper write-ups next week. I am cashed.