Dilettantes: an underserved market segment

Watching Olympics coverage at my in-laws’ while muddling through a cold. Observed through a mucusy haze a few things:

• The provincialism of CTV is astonishing.
• Vancouver’s weather is governed by capricious spirits.
• I have no idea what I’m watching.

I’ve been obsessing lately about one of the principles espoused in The Brothers Heath’s excellent book Made To Stick: approximately, it’s that you’ll be heard best if you listen to yourself with the ears of your audience.

With extremely rare exception there are no sports announcers covering the 2010 games who are bearing this principle in mind.

Just now an announcer said, by way of “offering some perspective,” that mogul skiers move at up to “10 meters per second”. I have no idea what that speed means without picking up a calculator. So much for perspective.

What the announcers do talk about is whether so-and-so’s “program” was “technically challenging” and how “solid” their landing was while at no time speaking to the audience as if it’s the first time they’re seeing human beings do some of these things, which for many of us it undoubtedly is.

(Nature documentaries seem to understand this far better than presenters of sports. I guess because the participants are non-human it’s assumed that the audience needs some help making sense of what they’re seeing.)

Take the luge. For macabre reasons it’s in the spotlight these days. But does anyone understand how this sport works? Don’t most of us suspect it’s not really a sport at all, but a horizontal rebuttal to bungee jumping?

But we also know that we’re probably missing something. We know it’s bad to slow down. We know it’s hard to see what your heels are pointed at when you’re lying on your back. We’ve all tobogganned.

Among the things we don’t know is whether you can steer one of those little sleds. And it’s not clear how weight and height aid or hinder a competitor. We don’t know why some lugers come out of turns cleanly while others rattle against the sides of the track. How to tell when one is luging well or poorly is so elementary a thing that we almost fail to notice that it’s entirely obscure.

But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a channel (even if it’s just an alternative audio track on existing channels) that covered sports with commentary that informed the viewer of the principles at play? I’d seek out coverage of unfamiliar sports (cricket, anyone?) if the announcers told me how to watch what I’m watching.

• How do the rifles in biathlon work differently from a conventional hunting rifle?
• Why do mogul skiers all have those bands on their knees?
• What the hell is going on in figure skating?

Why not let informed audience members contribute the audio track as a sort of real-time audio blog? Let fans recruit and train new fans. Feed curiosity and grow the sport. You can’t make an aficionado in an hour but you can convey an illusion of understanding, and that’s enough for us dilettantes.

Am I the only one?

Buzzed

A couple of us have been using the newly enable Google Buzz feature in Gmail. What’s Buzz? It’s kind of hard to explain.

Just a little off (to) the side (of gmail)

Got it? Alright.

I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.

Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.

With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.

I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.

Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.

If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s

• in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
• requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.

By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.

Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.

But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.