In the final article of our series about the intersection of technology and sports, we will briefly examine in impact of weblogs (now known as "blogs") on the sports world.

Many of you remember 1998, the title run by the Kentucky Wildcats that marked our third appearance in the National Finals in as many years, two of which resulted in the Wildcats being crowned national champions.  Many, if not most of us had Internet access back then, but in those days, sports content was limited mostly to the on-line presence of major publications.  There were a few sports-specific message boards and fan sites, but most of these bore little resemblance to the now-ubiquitous sports communities we see all over the Internet.

How different the fan experience was back then for the tech savvy!  You could not really share your feelings with the world, only the relative few inside your immediate circle of friends or family.  Sports information was something you had to purchase from stores, and the only real-time or near real-time sports delivery available was in the form of traditional broadcast media.  Local team coverage was spotty and relegated to a couple of call-in shows and five minutes during the broadcast sports report.  Reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep, with very few opportunities to examine statistical trends, hobnob with fellow dedicated fans, and even interact with the sportscasters who covered the teams themselves.

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Back in 1990 when I started using the Internet, it was all about Usenet.  I got my start online back in the late 1980's with BBS (Bulletin-Board Systems) which is kind of like a predecessor to email list servers.  You could download packets of topics and comments, add your own, then upload a packet and the conversation would be updated.  Using off-line readers was much easier at the very slow speeds than trying to research and type a complicated comment online, so I became a huge fan of BBS off-line message readers.

CompuServe was my first foray into on-line communities, and for those of you who remember what that was like, it was pretty cool for its time.  From there, we graduated to direct Internet Service Providers, and Gopher and WAIS.  Soon, the World Wide Web was created from the bones of Gopher and the web browser gradually became the rage.  Marc Andreesen, who worked on the first graphical browser known as Mosaic at the University of Illinois would go on to found Netscape in 1994, and introduce Netscape Navigator.  The explosion of Netscape's popularity would give rise to what we now know as the World Wide Web.

Fast forward to 2010.  We now have much more than text and picture delivery over the Internet.  We have video, and very decent video at that, even if it still lags well behind the quality of what is available over cable and broadcast.  Miss that Wildcats game?  You can always go back and watch it on ESPN3, or other providers of games.  Even some schools provide game replays online for a nominal charge, or for free.

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This is the first in a series of three sponsored posts by Samsung Electronics Company.

Think about the first time you saw a High-Definition television picture.  I remember where I was exactly.  It was in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcaster's convention, 1993, the year of the Grand Alliance.

When I had begun reading about HD TV and the HD standard (I was a purchasing agent for television equipment and parts at the time) I had never really imagined that it would be that big a deal.  I have lived through years with no television, through black and white TV and the transition to color, and the television picture had not changed in terms of picture quality very much since I was a teenager.  I knew how TV worked, and even though I was aware of the cutting edge, it was all about digital effects, and less about picture delivery, except for what seemed to me to be a bunch of dreamers. 1080 lines, indeed, I scoffed.  Where would you get the bandwidth?  Compression?  At the time, compression was a joke.

Then I saw what HD television really meant, and I was in awe.

I had never seen a picture like that.  At first, I thought it was fake -- a video monitor frame around a picture or something.  It was like looking through a window, and the clarity and sharpness were breathtaking.  I couldn't wait to see the first commercially-viable HDTV sets.  But as it turned out, I had to wait a long time.

This is not about the history of HDTV, it's about how that particular technology makes a difference in the way I view sports, in particular, Kentucky sports.  I know most of you remember watching grainy pictures of Wildcat basketball where the only way you could identify the players was practically by memorizing their body types and haircuts.  It was like looking at the game through glass made in the 1800's almost, and then there was that constant picture roll or squiggle you had to adjust constantly in order to keep the frame centered. 

I can remember times when it was almost more enjoyable to listen to Cawood's dulcet tones on the radio than to watch it on TV.  Somehow, the mental picture I could generate seemed more real, more inspiring, than what the television could deliver.  "Moving from left to right on your radio dial" focused the mind on a visual, not just aural response, and the most flexible display in the known universe is driven by the human imagination.

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