Broad's career takes off

Disclosure: I’m a bit schizophrenic when it comes to nationality – I’m a Kiwi by upbringing but have lived in the UK since I was 20. In other words, this weekend, in sporting terms, was golden for me: NZ’s All Blacks beat the Australian Wallabies 18-19 in the Rugby to secure the Bledisloe Cup and England clinched the final (cricket) test match of the Ashes series to win the trophy back at the Oval.

Throughout my time in the online business world, I’ve recognised that sport is a key ‘passion centre’ driving the way that people consume media online – be it on any of the ‘three screens’ we like to talk about.

But for me, one of the key elements of this summer’s Ashes series has been the way in which Twitter has played a significant role. If I had a pound for every time I’ve read Lily Allen‘s comments about cricket…

Not just that, but there have been tweets galore from various cricketers – including Graeme Swann (who got into mildly hot water when clearly tweeting while driving), James Anderson and (most controversially) Phillip Hughes, whose one and only tweet revealed that he’d been dropped from the Australian side before the news had reached the England team in more conventional fashion.

Against a backdrop where a research company derided most tweets as ‘meaningless babble’, it seems to be meaningless babble that newspapers love quoting…

More to the point, to me, it signals again that we have moved further and further away from a world where what makes it into the public domain is controlled by how interesting the comments are to real people rather than to the editors of various forms of broadcast media. Or, put another way, the ‘democratisation of the means of distribution’ of content.

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