march 2.0 madness

This is the month of March and that means it’s time to fill out NCAA tournament brackets. It seems like every website is having a bracket challenge, including Facebook, ESPN, CBS, and more. The Facebook contest is an example of mixed media, because a big company like CBS is combining with a social network to hold a bracket contest on their site. This is web 2.0 because of Facebook and because of the design of this contest. The official contest portion of Facebook reminds me of a wiki with its layout and content. There are many different links to click on that bring up a bunch of information such as brackets, teams, other people in the contest, your friends picks, message boards, and even pop up information about all 64 teams in the tourney. It is actually really cool and makes me happy that web 2.0 exists. Millions of Americans are going to be heavily using this web 2.0 spectrum over the next couple weeks and relying on it to show them just how bad their picks really are.