Friday, April 10, 2009

The Masters New Media

When you think of The Masters, you think of Wood, Nicklaus and Palmer. Augusta National. Amen Corner. The rites of spring.

But over the years, The Masters has done a great job of weaving new media into the fabric of its event. It was among the first sports events of any kind to have a live scoreboard, launching one in 1996.

Since 2008, The Masters Web site is leverageing IBM's Many Eyes software to give you new ways to follow the event:

1) Data visualizations that allow you to track scores by hole, participants by country and follow eagles, birdies and bogeys, year-by-year, since 1946. The latter is a great fact-checking tool for any golf writer. The statistics are presented as charts and graphics to help readers understand the information.

2) Word trees and tag clouds, which have been popular on the Web the past year or so.

The site also has a blog, Twitter feed, Facebook fan page and a leaderboard widget that you can imbed on your blog.

Check them out at The Masters Web site.