I'm wistful and nostalgic for the early days of the web, which for many of us goes only back to 1995 or, maybe 1998 or 2000. Many of my friends who I've met through this site feel likewise.
We were joined in those early days through a common bond - the need to fight back against the mighty NFL owners when Art Modell picked up "our" team and moved it to Baltimore. After that, we were joined by a common dislike of all things Ratbird, which temporarily displaced the Pittsburgh Steelers as Cleveland's most disliked NFL franchise.
It's been almost a dozen years now since Art Modell took pro football away from the city of Cleveland. As I get older, such an interval seems almost brief, although the memory grows hazier each year.
At the time, the internet was a binding force, helping fans to coordinate a counterattack that returned the Browns to Cleveland within three years.
Since 1995, the world wide web has gotten both larger and smaller.
It has gotten larger in that more and more voices have joined the web. Through blogs, social networks and a stupefying array of independent sports websites hoping to attract an audience, the web has split into a million babbling pieces, all fighting for the eyeballs of the sports fan. The number of unique domains visited by web surfers has nearly doubled since 2001, from 2.8 million to over five million.
While the web has more sites and more surfers, fewer websites control the activity. The amount of internet traffic controlled by the top ten websites has increased almost ten percent in the last five years.
The predominance of search technology has accelerated this process. Rather than making more diverse sites easy to find and visit, structuring of search results by companies like Google tends to herd more and more fans to highly visited sites which rank at the top of the list, or can spend funds on search engine optimization.
What one is left with are a few huge corporate voices where people spend most of their time, with the shrinking percentage of pageviews being scattered over remainder. Large sports sites (ESPN, Foxsports, League Sites, local portals, Yahoo, etc) grab the majority of the time of sports fans while the remainder is dispersed an inch deep over the million contending voices that remain.
The power of the few to influence and inform has increased while the influence of smaller fan-fueled sites has virtually vanished. This is a fundamental change since 1995, when we got more of our information from each other, rather than ESPN or a half-million blogs which link to it. Web petitions, considered almost-meaningful in 1995, are essentially worthless in 2008.
While in some domains, the web can still make a difference, I fear that the sports web has now become dominated by a few large corporate interests. When even bloggers are taking under-the-table payments from sports teams or spamming corporate boards (even those on Scout), the war is pretty much over.
It was nice while it lasted, though.
Sigh.