I'm a big fan of American football, and watching the Eagles painful loss yesterday evening got me thinking about how web 2.0 is profoundly changing the football experience.

For a growing amount of the football audience, the most exciting thing about football is fantasy sports: the ability to make your own team and your own league, and simulate your own season with your friends.

For fantasy players, the biggest impact fantasy has is that you now root primarily for your fantasy team, and less for the "real" teams that the fantasy team is based upon.

Example: One of the people I watched the game with yesterday was born and raised in the New York area, and thus had grown up a Giants fan. On his fantasy team, though, he had Correll Buckhalter -- a player on the Eagles. And so, he was rooting for Buckhalter and other individuals on his fantasy team.


As attention shifts to fantasy teams, so too will value. And since fantasy teams are reconstructed teams -- teams created by remixing content -- value shifts to services that reconstruct data.

An example of how value is shifting to services that reconstruct data can be seen in how sports are presented on television. Networks fill the game watching experience with tons of statistics relevant to the game at hand. Those statistics are generated by querying a massive database of information.

Reconstructing big pools of data -- think Google Base -- to create niche databases, and applications that query those niche databases, is where value is shifting.

Most importantly, this is a trend that extends well beyond football. Outside.in takes data and reclassifies it to create niche local portals. A company like Techmeme reclassifies data to create all sorts of niche portals -- witness Techmeme, Memeorandum, WeSmirch, BallBug. With my site, I take data syndicated from RSS aggregators like Google Blog Search and video aggregators like YouTube to create my own unique portal.

This is where value is shifting. Note the importance of RSS to this concept; in fact, from another perspective, it could simply be stated that companies that leverage the disruptive potential of RSS will be best positioned to capture value in the reconstruction-based economy.

Of Course, Don't Forget to Keep Your Eye on the Ball


Any wide receiver knows that if you want to make the catch, you have to keep your eye on the ball. And likewise, the same is true for life in the reconstruction economy: football may be nice and fun, but the real ball Americans should be keeping their eye on is a corrupt government and a complicit, propaganda-spewing corporate media -- and how football is a key part of that agenda. Football games are laced with ads that sell false patriotism (false patriotism = loyalty to government rather than to principles) and ads that sell military service. Regrettably, America is not so much about freedom, democracy, and capitalism, as it once was; instead, America 2.0 is about football, big government, imperialism, and a dangerously naive population -- one that seems perfectly content with knowing more about obscure football stats than about the facts surrounding 9/11, JFK, the Federal Reserve, or pretty much any issue of real importance.