Be Smart

It's not exactly news that more and more chunks of our lives are lived on the Internet. But every now and then we get a reminder - of how, for example, the 'net increasingly is taking over jobs that used to be exclusively television's. Case in point: March Madness, a US sports phenomenon that is also a television phenomenon, disrupting regular programming for weeks every spring. It is now huge on the Web as well - and destined to get even more so this year.

Because it eats up a good deal of April, too, we still have several more weeks of March Madness, the NCAA Men's Division annual basketball championship, a tourney with scores of games and a dizzyingly complex playoff structure. That gives us all plenty of time to check out this year's biggest deal, an experiment at Joost, the free video site. Joost is conducting a hugely ambitious live test of its video streaming system, planning to broadcast every single game to anyone anywhere in the world.

The actual games are the least of March Madness, but the side activities are a Web phenomenon too. There are dozens - probably hundreds - of sites and blogs keeping track of brackets, many collected at the Bracket Project. What's a bracket? As the usually invaluable Wikipedia explains, a bracket is the "diagrammatic representation of the series of games played during a tournament, named as such because it appears to be a large number of interconnected (punctuational) brackets." Got that? A 2006 New York Times article also attempted clarification, with equally opaque results. To me, anyway. See the pic above, which is sort of a help.

Brackets aside, there's another March basketball Madness going on too, although you wouldn't know it from the buzz. That would be the NCAA Women's Division Championship.