Web 2.0 masses tackle English Football ownership

My Football Club – Own the club and pick the team

My Football Club is an online effort to sign-up 50,000 soccer (oops, I mean football) fans with the aims of buying an English football club.

When you sign up on the website for free, you will be asked to vote for the club that the group should attempt to purchase. After 50,000 people sign-up, everyone will be asked to pay £35 each (for a total of £1,375,000), and the organizers will start negotiations with the club at the top of the list.
Instead of having a manager, all decisions will be made by the 50,000 owners online, including the selection of the head coach, player transfers, player selection, team strategy and more. Of course, £1,375,000 will not be able to purchase a top tier team, but it's hoped that within 5 years, the myfootballclub.co.uk team could get promoted to the Premiership.

This is a really unique idea in professional sports, and I’m sure a lot of people will be watching on both sides of the Atlantic. If it works, co-operative ownership could be used by community leaders to acquire and resurrect struggling local sports franchises.

I'll do the free sign up, and we’ll see what happens. It’s hard to imagine a League Two team with 50,000 attentive owner/fans not succeeding. Because of the attention, it's easy to imagine that the club would at least be able to attract much larger sponsors than its peers.

Today’s Link source: Springwise newsletter

Keeping tabs on Japanese style...

Japanese Lifestyle Magazine Tokyocube

The Linkjockey used to live and teach English in Japan. There's so much going on in Japan in terms of art, design, travel and style that just isn't replicated anywhere else.

I miss Muji, The Loft and going to shopping. I miss keeping up with the latest 5-minute trends. I miss experiential restaurants and the best creepy children's toys for adults. But all is not lost, and I can still track a few of these things through Tokyocube.

Tokyocube brings a lot of these elements together in their very stylish online magazine.

The Future of Television

Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Gallactica beat broadcast TV

Want to know where broadcast TV is heading?

This hour-long talk by Mark Pesce in Australia discusses tons and tons of opportunities for advertisers; TV, film and video producers and media companies created because of the explosion of Bit Torrent (peer-to-peer) video downloads. There are just so many new opportunites for marketing companies, advertisers, media producers, broadcasters, and new ways to distribute video (not just Youtube, either).

Once again, it looks like the huge media companies have it all backwards. Instead of trying to reinforce and tightly control the current system with increasingly strict copyright restrictions; they could be trying out all these new opportunities.

Oh yeah, did I mention that VideoSift is a pretty good online video aggregator?

Personally recommended links

Linkjockey

There is SO MUCH out there on the web. After the initial novelty of surfing the web to wherever the links will take us, we tend to settle into the same routine web commute everytime we load up our internet browsers.

This daily blog aims to point you to something new and exciting on the web each and every day, that was personally recommended to you by the Canadian blogger, Christopher Walks.
It's a new discovery; a new adventure for you on the internet everyday.

Okay, so maybe it's a bit tacky to recommend my own blog as the link of the day. This is the identity statement for this blog. On the last day of 2006, it's also the "trial opening" of a new web destination that I hope you'll enjoy coming back to everyday to find the newest and most interesting sites on the internet.