Joseph Miller's Blog

Even though I don’t know a ton of people in my town, I enjoy “playing” Foursquare and to a lesser extent Gowalla.  In Foursquare’s case, mayorships can be somewhat fun to pursue and the geo-specific deals can be worthwhile on rare occasion.  The people I know that are crazy about Gowalla seem to be focus more on the virtual item quest, either collecting everything or hunting down low numbered items or whatnot.

In both cases, the location game is played as an individual.  I think this limiting and both services, or even maybe an API built on top of them, could be a lot more fun with a tongue in cheek gang component added and fully embracing the game aspect rather than existing in the social networking-location game hybrid space they seem to exist in now.

Here’s how it could work:

1. Gangs could form fluidly with members joining and leaving at will, perhaps with a cap on members and a gang leader approval required.

2. Replace “mayorship” with turf.  On the most basic level, the gang with the most collective checkins controls the location.

3. Virtual items provide attributes to individuals or gangs such as double points for checkins at a certain location or local business coupons.

4. When a gang takes over a location they can loot items from the previous gang that controlled the turf.

That’s the idea in a nutshell.  I think it would be a lot more fun.  As an individual user, I would have more incentive to coordinate and meet with other users and businesses could possibly see more benefits in terms of foot traffic than with either Foursquare or Gowalla’s current incentive systems.

Most importantly, I could finally break out that blue bandana in my closet.

Like many folks, I like basketball.  In particular, I like the business and news that swirls around basketball.  Unlike most of life, the world of any given sport is relatively easy to comprehend and wrap your head around.  There’s only so many teams and players to consider and each entity has individual attributes that are well known.  Of course, even within this world there are unknowns and that element of surprise is much of the fun too.

Much like the sport is somewhat of a closed loop, the media surrounding it is as well.  Each team has many a handful of beat writers, only a few of which are notable, and daily national coverage by ESPN, Sporting News, Yahoo Sports and a handful of other outlets.  Beyond that, there are only so many blogs out there that I find worth reading or find at all.  So again, it’s easy to wrap your head around this world surrounding the basketball world.

Considering all this and being somewhat of a contrarian by nature, I was as fascinated as anyone else by the coverage and instant backlash surrounding LeBron’s recent defection to Miami Heat.  The very clear narrative that has come through the opinion media doesn’t deviate very much from the core opinion that LeBron is immature and let him ego get the best of him.  Certainly, LeBron is going to be hated in Cleveland for a long time, but the instant heel turn as portrayed by the media seems like a wildly inaccurate portrayal of reality to me.

On the face of it, LeBron’s impending free agency was touted as the story of the year by ESPN and others dating back to before the season even started.  Any slight indication of what he might do garnered instant pontification from the shouting punditry on a daily basis.  Surely he was asked about it daily by reporters as well.  Both the public and LeBron knew that this story was a big deal.  So what does he do?

He decides to tap into the demand and leverage it to earn money for charity while generating “earned media” for both ESPN and himself.  To me, this seems like a generous move and in the best interest of everyone involved in the sports business except the journalists.  This act of disintermediation attacked no one except the reporters that derive income, attention, ego and power from the coverage that their scoops generate.  Their reaction was visceral because they felt threatened, not because LeBron had instantly changed who he was and become drunk with power.

Here’s the thing, most sports news doesn’t contain much information beyond the headline.  If the headline reads “Player X signs with Team Y for 3 years and 10 million dollars”, you barely need to click and read the boilerplate article.  You already know what it says.  LeBron isn’t the only one announcing his own news.  Derek Fisher recently announced his resigning via Twitter, as did Udonis Haslem his.  I think this has reporters running scared, especially those that focus on breaking news more than analyzing it.

And they should be.  But they should be mad at Twitter, not LeBron.