Local Bridges in Sports Media
This article from the New York Times discusses a new startup known as SportsStream. The article specifically profiles Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the professional football team the Seattle Seahawks, who has invested in the startup. The goal of SportsStream is to streamline information about events happening in the sports world to make it easier to access for a large network of fans. Using human and computer editing, SportsStream identifies the best writers in social media for different teams and weeds out the extraneous posts that are not relevant to the story. It also eliminates posts that deliver the same information further streamlining the content. For example, in a football game last week involving Paul Allen’s Seahawks versus the Green Bay Packers, a controversial call at the end of the game resulted in what twitter said to be over a million tweets. SportsStream narrowed its feed down to a mere 421 contributors for a total of 2,521 tweets. This allows clear information to reach a broad audience easily.
This article, and the company SportsStream, can be used to demonstrate the concept of the strength of weak ties through its use of social networking sites. The strength of weak ties is the result of the existence of bridges in networks. Bridges connect two nodes in a network that would otherwise be in two different components. This allows for people to have new sources of information coming from a potentially distant part of a network. SportsStream identifies the best sports writers to use for its own information feed. Since they are the best it is likely that they have a large social media following on sites such as twitter. These relationships can be classified bridges because in most cases the fan would not be in a network with the writer if it were not for following said writer to gain information. These bridges created by SportsStream allow users to gain access to information from across networks that they previously might not have had access to.
source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/a-win-win-for-paul-allens-seahawks-and-a-sports-start-up/
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