– Tricia Jonker has learned that boyfriends will come and go, but love for fantasy football is forever.
– Yahoo says that its “Fantasy Football Live” is the Web’s most-watched live show, garnering as many as 250,000 streams per week.
– The Obama administration has already begun tapping Cabinet members, so you’re running out of time to show off your predictive ability in the Fantasy Cabinet competition.
– Here’s a look at how Open Sports is being powered. I’d explain more about it, but I don’t know what the heck any of it means.
– Live Current Media is reporting record third-quarter earnings for this year, and its cricket-related ventures seem to be prominently involved. Though the sport remains a bit of an oddity to most Americans, cricket enjoys a tremendous international presence.
– Fantasy hockey players haven’t quite lost their Tom Brady, but the four-month injury to New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur will hurt.
– The Web marketing forecasters at J.P. Morgan have lowered expectations for internet ad sales for the second time in two months, though the did emphasize that things could be looking up soon.
It can be very tough to get interested in politics.
There’s no doubt that elections and the elected officials that emerge from them carry great importance. After all, these are the people who create and modify policies that direct much of our daily lives.
Those policies, though, can be involved and confusing, and the partisan bluster blowing from both sides doesn’t make their real impact any easier to understand. Representatives who spend most of their time telling us what they think we want to hear afford us little opportunity to really learn much about them. Young people, in particular, who might be shy of voting age and more detached from the actual effects of government might look for a minute and think, “Why bother?”
Maybe the best way to get people to pay attention is to turn the whole thing into a game. As we head to the polls to select our 44th president — as well as a variety of other reps — there seems to be growing support for doing so.
We linked last week to a column by an Associated Press sports writer who conducted an auction draft with friends and colleagues for the electoral map, but there are websites out there that allow anyone to play along with the real elections.
Fantasy Politics USA is a blog that has offered a presidential game throughout this campaign season. There really doesn’t seem to be a lot to the game, other than a relatively arbitrary number of points assigned for various — sometimes entertaining — reasons. Barack Obama, for example, gained 4 points back in May “for saying ‘Lay Off My Wife’ on Good Morning America,” according to the site. (John McCain, meanwhile, picked up 4 of his own in July “for going to see the Yankees play.” I, quite frankly, would have taken away points … unless he rooted against them.)
The site also presents an American Idol-style polling contest that is down to its final three contestants. McCain, in case you’re wondering, is no longer in the field, which has been narrowed to Obama, Ron Paul and Chuck Hagel.
Real Clear Politics offers a stock market-style game, whereby users purchase virtual contracts on things such as Fred Thompson winning the Republican nomination (probably not a good idea to invest there at this point).
The site has been around since 2000 and also provides roundups of political coverage, commentary and poll data.
The most robust politics game site out there, though, has to be FantasyCongress.com. According to the site’s History page, it’s a concept that was driven by the attention-wrangling force of fantasy football.
“Impressed by the power of fantasy sports to engage and captivate their players, Andrew decided that someone needed to invent a fantasy sports game to challenge political junkies and to attract average people to the world of politics,” the site says, referring to Andrew Lee, who created Fantasy Congress while still in college.
The site launched in spring 2006 and has already been featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio and CNN. It centers on a game that has you draft senators and house members and awards points based on their legislative success.
“If people cared about government as much as they cared about football, then we might have a better government,” Lee said during a 2006 interview on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”
In addition to offering a sheer opportunity for competition, the site touts its usefulness as a teaching tool. Indeed, social studies teachers would seem to have a much easier time engaging their students in learning about the process of turning a bill into law if the congresswoman sponsoring that bill is earning points for a student’s fantasy team.
Although it’s pretty much too late to get in on any presidential contests, a whole slate of new or renewed congress members could make the next few months a prime time to get in on Fantasy Congress. Even if you fall short of a championship, you might learn something along the way.
– The wait is over. Fantasy Baseball Dugout has finally thrown its support behind Barack Obama.
– Amid all the crusty old newspaper sports columnists who think that fantasy sports are killing real sports because people now root for players on opposing teams, this Eagle Tribune columnist understands the boon that fantasy is.
– Match Analysis Inc. wants to take the sports video service it has been selling to teams for analytical purposes and market it for public consumption. Our own Jeff Thomas believes the company could find a market.
– The Wall Street Journal’s Nando Di Fino applies the tools available via Accuscore and Sports Data Hub in hopes of resuscitating a 1-7, last-place fantasy football team.
A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.
It can be very tough to get interested in politics.
