Watching a baseball game is easy. But how do you get a front-row seat for an around-the-world yacht race? Or for the first ascent of China's remote Karakoram Range? By visiting Quokka Sports, a Web site devoted to high-energy, total-immersion coverage of "adventure sports." Quokka uses multimedia tools to give spectators a firsthand look at hard-to-watch events. And lots of people are looking: The site's coverage of the Whitbread around-the-world yacht race attracted 1.8 million unique visitors. Recently Quokka signed a deal with NBC to help produce that network's Internet coverage of the Sydney Olympics.
Michael Gough, 43, Quokka's chief creative officer and executive producer, spoke with Fast Company about the design and production principles behind this addictive site.
Follow the muses.: Our production decisions are dictated by the "Quokka muses." Affinity: Make the spectator feel like part of a global audience. Empathy: Let people see the event through the competitors' eyes. Understanding: Help people feel like experts. Location: You've got to be there. Participation: Let people view the event from the inside.
Don't watch an event -- experience it.: We want people to experience events in an undiluted way. Our coverage of the Around Alone sailing race is a good example. It's a 27,000-mile, 200-day solo yacht race that began last September. GPS technology lets us track the position of boats, while onboard cameras and audio recorders relay sights and sounds. The competitors email their thoughts to us -- which gives our audience direct access to what they're going through. Recently, we followed seven world-class climbers as they attempted the first ascent up China's Karakoram Range. We provided updated video and text coverage. But we also tracked each climber's biometrics -- including heart rate, body temperature, and blood oxygen.
See a different game.: Nobody wants to be told what to look at. That's why we provide multiple views of an event. Our coverage of the CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) FedEx Championship Series puts users behind the wheel. As you track a race, you can listen to a driver communicating with a pit chief -- or use the site to tune into the CART Radio Network to hear the real-time call. You decide how you want to follow the race.
Coordinates: www.quokka.com
Rotisserie baseball got its start in -- and its name from -- a now-defunct restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan called La Rotisserie Française. It was there, in 1980, that Dan Okrent, now editor-at-large at Time Inc., gathered a bunch of his young pals to explain to them a statistics-driven game that he had created during the off-season. Among the people gathered that day were Rob Fleder, now executive editor of Sports Illustrated, and Lee Eisenberg, now executive vice president and creative director at Lands' End. Okrent and his pals became the founding fathers of a truly mass phenomenon.
Today, 20 years later, six of the founding fathers, along with four other media types, are sitting in the offices of ESPN The Magazine. They're haggling over players and swapping corny jokes. Welcome to the 20th-anniversary draft of the original Rotisserie League. The drafting process hasn't changed much in 20 years. But almost everything else about this league has changed. Dan Okrent, now 51, has retired from active competition. The guys no longer design team logos or produce league newsletters. And thanks to the Web, they no longer spend hours wading through week-old statistics in order to calculate standings.
"If you're at all engaged in this game, then you can't get stats fast enough," says SI's Fleder, now 49. "The Net lets you follow box scores as they're being made."
"I'm convinced that the Internet was invented to serve the needs of Rotisserie leagues," adds Eisenberg, now 52, who has won the original Rotisserie League's championship five times in the past 20 years. "The Net makes preparation easier and faster. There's so much information."
These days, most of the league's owners use a service from USA Stats Inc. They enter information on teams -- rosters, salaries, recent trades -- and the system automatically tracks all relevant data to create the Rotisserie equivalent of an online stock portfolio.
The Web has also changed the game strategically -- by making sports news so easy to get that information is no longer a competitive advantage. That's why Eisenberg refuses to reveal the sites that he uses to stay ahead. But he does offer one piece of advice for aspiring Rotisserie moguls: Use the Web to track the sports pages of hometown newspapers for the players on your roster. Local coverage remains the best source of information on injuries and locker-room tensions. "You can't win this game if you don't go the extra mile," Eisenberg says.
Coordinates: www.usastats.com
The Web lets you follow game action from the comfort of your home or office. But there's still no substitute for being there. Ballparks tells you everything that you'd ever want to know about stadiums and arenas. Get all sorts of facts and figures for football, basketball, hockey, and baseball venues -- including directions, seating charts, and ticket information. All that's missing are peanuts and Cracker Jack.
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