Twitter As Realtime Sports Reporter

mikejuk writes that a "group of researchers at Rice University think that '[t]he global human population can be regarded as geographically distributed, multimodal sensors.' When it comes to sporting events, it seems that all you have to do is look to the Twitter frequency. The system that they created seems to work for most games. The exception to this is the Super Bowl for the reason that the sheer number of tweets about the game saturated the Twitter distribution system and so they couldn't pick out the maximum in tweet frequencies. They also have some interesting observations on how fast tweets follow an event." Sports reporting via Twitter makes me think of the stories about Ronald Reagan's broadcasting exploits creating "live" play-by-play based on telegraphed updates — and sometimes the wire went dead. I wonder whether the control-happy local franchises will do anything to prevent in-person fans creating and sharing such instant play-by-play accounts.