I'll admit that I'm the hammer that thinks everything's a nail. But I think Bowman should setting up a blog around this from the start.Other leagues are finding low-cost sports experts from a familiar talent pool: college students. “We pay them $15 an hour,” said Bob Bowman, the chief executive of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s online subsidiary. “It’s not a multimillion dollar project,” he added, “but nor is it a $100,000 project.”
Mr. Bowman said that MLB.com will later this year introduce a video search product so users can search through hundreds of games to find highlights from specific players. Users will likely be able to download those clips free, he said.
“The cost of the technology to do this keeps coming down, but we don’t really have a choice,” Mr. Bowman said. “We don’t know how a standard game from 1963 will drive revenue, but we have to have it.”
Paying college kids $15 an hour to archive these videos is smart. But I think it would be even smarter to have them building up an audience, and experience, (hell, a narrative) while they did so.
As far as searching for these videos, consider: MLB lead blogger Matt Watson's video of Manny Ramirez tenderly fondling Julian Tavarez is circulating the web right now. But would anyone ever dig this particular diamond from the rough if they weren't looking to make an excellent blog entry? I may be underestimating Bowman's college students, but I doubt it.
And yet that scene is Ramirez, in all his random bizarro glory. A search bar is great, but a blogger who enjoys dorking out on all the wonders waiting within the search bar is mo' bettah.
And chances are, that blogger will know where the market for these things is going.
