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Why Major League Baseball Is Out Of Touch

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
by Jeff

Someone needs to tell Major League Baseball how the Internet works because they clearly don’t get it. I’ll try to be that person, but more than likely won’t get noticed by MLB. If I do get noticed by MLB, I’ll find out when I get their cease and desist letter for using their logo.

By now you’ve probably seen the adorable video of the little girl and her dad at the Philadelphia Phillies game. Dad makes a great catch of a foul ball and gives it to his little girl who promptly throws it back. Dad throws his arms up in the air, smiles, gives his daughter a big hug and all of Citizen’s Bank Park collectively awwwww’s. You can’t write a better commercial for Major League Baseball. Normally I’d embed a YouTube video of this for you to see yourself. Enter Major League Baseball’s ignorance.

The now classic MLB disclaimer comes into play here that you probably have memorized yourself by now: “Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited.” The father and daughter foul ball moment happens to be an account of an MLB game and so like a dog that refuses to let go of its bone, MLB is removing videos of that heart warming moment as soon as they pop up on YouTube. You can see it if you want to, but ONLY at mlb.com.

Who got written permission? Television. Specifically the Today Show among others I’m sure. You however have no permission to share it with anyone, even though that’s kind of how the internet works. When word around the office spreads of something great that someone saw on TV last night, do people rush to their TV’s to catch it in case they missed it? If they do they’ll be lucky to see it again. Not so with the internet. It’s bound to be easily found on YouTube.

Most businesses would kill to have a video centered around their project go viral. It’s free advertising! Who would pass that up? Major League Baseball. They won’t even allow the “official” video on mlb.com to be embedded to at least give it a chance to go viral. They want one place and one place only to see it. That makes as much sense as McDonald’s opening one restaurant in the entire country. Want a Big Mac? Just travel to Dallas Texas.

It’s really time for companies to loosen the choke hold they have on their product and content. You have people who are willing to spread your message for free to the masses. If you owned a business why would you not take advantage of that? Swing and a miss MLB. Sit down.

Previously on Lost: What?

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
by Jeff

It’s always the videos made by people with too much time on their hands that make me laugh the most. Goes to show you, that the characters of Lost seem to know just as little as we do about that damn island.

Lost What Video – Mahalo

Myspace sucks

Sunday, October 14th, 2007
by Jeff

You know what’s wrong with myspace? Here’s the list:

• Blinking gifs
• Songs playing automatically on pages (songs that usually suck
• Comments left that include a graphic that doesn’t get scaled down so now your page layout is all screwed up
• Backgrounds that make it impossible to read the text
• Text that you have to highlight to read
• Pages with 20 Youtube videos all playing at once
• People who use comments instead of email when asking personal questions
• The WORST blogging software ever made
• No widgets, gadgets or whatever else you want to call them
• Friends who thought that hot chick about to take her top off video that got sent to them would be so good that when they clicked on it and “myspace“said “oops you’ve got to be logged in to do that,” they went ahead and “logged in” and gave their password to some place that is now spamming me with Macy’s gift cards, deals on marijuana, and telling me that size does matter.

That’s just the short list too.

So I shopped around for my own web presence, one that I can be social with and customize without all the mess. Word Press was my first choice. I like Word Press a lot and am using it for other ventures, but I haven’t learned enough about style sheets to take full advantage of it yet.

Then I came across Windows Live Spaces. I was pretty skeptical, because Microsoft hasn’t exactly been batting 1.000 lately. Vista is a nightmare, and does anyone actually own a Zune? For all its faults, Microsoft does get a lot of things right, like the XBox 360, Windows Media Center, and now I can add to that list Live Spaces.

Spaces does have social networking features, but it looks a lot cleaner then any mypsace page. It’s also more customizable. Myspace doesn’t let me add widgets, or as Microsoft likes to call them gadgets. These little apps that you add to your page can do anything from showing you the weather to letting you play mini-video games. I’ve opted for using them to show my Xbox360 gamer card, the books I’m reading, and some other things I’ll add soon.

So I’ll try Spaces for a while and see if I continue to like it. If it turns out I don’t, I can easily keep this page and create another blog somewhere else and post to the same entries to both. So you all keep your silly little myspace. It’s so 2006.