Dallas Mavericks owner does IT right - good model for NEO team owners

I just noticed a posting on Good Morning Silicon Valley about a blog written by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. I was surprised the owner of a sports team would be into blogging - and his insight so valuable - so I checked out his blog. Turns out he was able to buy the Mavericks because he is a successful IT entrepreneur, and he is an expert in technology matters - so his insight is more valuable than I imagined.

Besides learning from his posting introduced and linked below, consider how important this technology has become for community leaders to share insight with their stakeholders - if you visit his posting on the issue below you'll see there are 57 comments - he has fans - his team has fans - he is a smart business man using IT well.

He provides news feeds from his blog and from the Mavericks team website, making it effortless to keep up with all related insight. This made me curious if there are blogs covering Cleveland sport teams. There are many, but none appear official or especially insightful. I further checked out the official Cleveland team sites and none are providing RSS feeds or much in the way of fan interaction - although it is interesting they seem to be getting into wireless.

Browns-related blogs are found here
Browns official site - no RSS found here [1]
[2]<>
Indians-related blogs are found here [3]
Indians official site - no RSS found here [4]

Cavaliers-related blogs are found here [5]
Cavaliers official site - no RSS found here [6]

Lesson learned from Mavericks owner Mark Cuban:

When will the music industry do it right ?

Can the music industry cry wolf any longer?

This is the only industry in the world that can see thousands of its retailers close, reduce the number of products
it sells via cutbacks in artist rosters and albums released, cut back marketing and promotional dollars and then blame
a reduction in sales on someone or something other than themselves.

That big bad boogieman of piracy is blowing down everyone’s house. The poor music industry. Except of course that
there is nothing more than anecdotal proof that Peer to Peer networks hurt music sales, and to counter those, there are
studies and anecdotal evidence that the sampling opportunity that P2P networks create actually help sales.

Of course, the other digital entertainment mediums have seen booming sales over the same period. Games. DVDs. VHS.
Even books on tape have grown. I’m not saying anything new here, nor I am saying anything I haven’t said before. Which
leads to my points:

1. The amount of money the RIAA is spending, along with other lobbying efforts in the industry, could go to artists,
and probably be better spent on marketing the industry and getting consumers excited, rather building a wall around
your industry that only slows it down.

2. It’s a crime that our politicians have fallen prey to your “please protect us please.� Our country is in enough
debt. We don’t need to spend more to put legal walls around your industry. How long before we have tort reform for the
music industry?

3. There are solutions that are simple. Learn a lesson from the cable and phone industry. Go to where people already
are paying for digital access to your product, and for a little bit more money, give them a more product, legally and
easily.

VIsit Mark Cuban's blog [7]

About Mark Cuban: [8]

Prior to his purchase of the Mavericks, Cuban co-founded Broadcast.com,
the leading provider of multimedia and streaming on the Internet, in
1995, selling it to Yahoo! in July of 1999. Before Broadcast.com, Cuban
co-founded MicroSolutions, a leading National Systems Integrator, in
1983, and later sold it to CompuServe.

Today, in addition to his ownership of the Mavericks, Cuban is an
active investor in leading and cutting-edge technologies and continues
to be a sought-after speaker.