Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Allen Barra. His focus is on building the game from the grassroots, like minor league baseball, instead of focusing on big market plays like the NBA. I agree. I have had a similar conversation with Dave Oster, GM of the Lake Elsinore Storm. They are successful by creating an experience. They work with the local community, and secure promotional partnerships. Corporate sponsorships are all over the stadium and the sponsors are treated well. Merchandising gives small teams a competitive edge and forces creativity.

Online Journalism Review interviews Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News.

Alaska Airlines has a new parody site online. It speaks to people’s frustrations with flying and leaves subtle clues that Alaska Air is different. They even take a shot at Greyhound.

Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung have authored a whitepaper on the custom Google File System.

“D.C. United announced today that an MRI exam performed today on Nick Rimando revealed that the goalkeeper has a torn left ACL. Rimando will undergo surgery next week and is expected to miss the remainder of the 2003 MLS season.” Nick blocked a penalty kick earlier in the game. Tough luck Nacho. Gotta be a soldier.

Spidering Hacks is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. 304 pages. Scheduled release is on November 1.

This week I was introduced to a new use for my blog : people trying to find out more about me. I was having some Beamish after soccer practice on Wednesday and some of my players knew things about me that I had never mentioned to anyone on the team. Today I checked my logs and I had about 11 unique visitors from my Yahoo! profile. (I use Yahoo mail as a social account) A few people I work with read my blog. One person was introduced to RSS for the first time today and I helped point him to some feeds. Does my weblog define me? Not really. I write about what I think people are interested in reading. Search engines account for about 50% of my referrals. Sports and gadgets are the popular topics. I judge how well I am engaging a community by reading my comments. So why are you here?

Segway is recalling its human transporters for a software upgrage. If the batteries are near the end of charge you may fall. The software fix will probably decrease the allowed battery life. I assume all transporters are recalled, and Segway estimates 6,000 units. Are there only 6,000 Segways in the world?

Landmark Theatres, nation’s largest art-house chain, purchased by Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment company. Landmark is my best choice for indie movies in San Francisco. I hope I still have variety of movies and not shut out movie houses such as Fox Searchlight.