IU grad creates Web site for lonely sports fans to connect with friends, other users

Lone sports fans soon will have the opportunity to share their hoops, hollers and other hysterics with groups of friends through a new Web site called ShoutOuts. User participation would require a headset and a PC near your TV.\nRight now the Web site only includes basics like a blog, but over the next few weeks a demo version will go up soon. The finalized version should be up by late summer. The creator, recent IU graduate Matthew Weldon, plans to have a stable version available quickly. \nWeldon said he first conceptualized the Web site for his capstone project, the informatics equivalent to a graduate thesis project. Weldon initially got the idea while interning with the Indiana Pacers and witnessing fan participation exemplified by noisemakers, face paint and pompoms. \n"Different sports are doing some neat things with online sport media," Weldon said. "Video feeds, play-by-play stats; they're informative and flashy but they are forgetting about fan communication." \nWhen finished, ShoutOuts will allow users to form groups of over 100 people and enable people with the ability to see their buddies' reactions and hear their shouts of pleasure or pain. Users will be embodied by photos or text and their symbol will grow along with their hooting. \n"I think it's a great idea," said senior Ryan Cox. "It puts a more human face on technology." \nWeldon said that most hot sites on the Internet have social applications. To Weldon, it was obvious to start looking at the sports community.\nHe said audience participation online doesn't exist; some message boards offer the possibility to share feelings, but are not properly equipped to handle the spontaneity that makes sports what they are.\nAlthough the ShoutOuts archetype is designed for an NBA basketball game, Weldon thinks the site might suit sports like soccer and hockey better because the fans tend to be more erratic. \n"The fans tend to do more spontaneous things and games have fewer stops," Weldon said, after recently attending a hockey game in Canada. "The fans up there put us to shame." \nWeldon's challenge was to create a way for fans to interact without disrupting the tempo of the excitement. Tackling this problem has not been an easy task and details are still being sorted out, he said. Even the ultimate fate of his idea remains uncertain. \n"People didn't want to have big involved conversation," Weldon said, regarding his first attempt to create an audio based system. "They just wanted to yell and stuff." \nThe audio system gave rise to a visual interactive system. Weldon is still tailoring his idea through research called user testing, which would allow him to observe the behavior of individuals and possibly take into account features he had not considered in order to make sure people use the site. \n"At this point I would just be happy to get it done, but if someone offered me $500,000 for it tomorrow I would say OK," he said. \nWeldon admits he is not necessarily looking to make money but said he wouldn't turn it down either. Recently at a conference in Montreal, where researchers presented posters on various topics, he was approached by a marketer from Michigan who wanted to use his system for a specific sports team, but the contract with the team eventually fell through. \nWeldon said the system might become open source, meaning it would be free to download and changes could be made by anyone similar to the Linux system.