I’ve written before about why fantasy soccer may hold the key to the future of news. Now it seems the Guardian‘s new Chalkboard feature is catching on to this idea, too. This interactive database-driven toolkit allows you to create your own “chalkboards” illustrating any point you may wish to make about a team or player’s performance.
Here’s my first attempt …
Cute, yes? But more than just cute. This is an idea that takes sports data and makes it more than just “interactive.” This makes it communicative. You are not just toying with data — you’re creating it to make a point.
Once you create a chalkboard it is published to everyone, with space for comments. You can send it, share it or embed it. Clearly there is room for improvements — starting with searchability and findability from the chalkboard/team page, and the occasional bug. (For instance, the description I entered is not visible in the embedded chalkboard above. Also, limiting it to the final 15 minutes does not seem to have worked — you still see all passes.) But really, that would be picking holes in what is a beautifully thought-through piece of work.
This effort assumes that for online news to work, it must be a platform as well as a destination — a platform that in turn opens up plenty of revenue opportunities.
The Chalkboard feature also claims that soccer match stats will be available just 15 minutes after the full-time whistle. Suddenly all those calls to local radio stations to bemoan team managers’ tactics seem one-dimensional. Plus, spending 60 seconds reading the match report is nothing compared to the time you’ll spend carefully constructing your argument about why your star midfielder should not have been sold to that close relegation rival. …
(Thanks to Alex Lockwood for the tip.)
