The web in 2011 is no longer about the destination. It’s about the data created by all of us that’s flowing through hundreds of different sites and apps. Blogs, social media, and RSS have completely changed the landscape. The major tech blogs like Mashable, Techcrunch, and ReadWriteWeb are starting to take notice of the major role that data is starting to play on the web. Take a look at some of their most recent posts:

Using Big Data and Analytics to Automate the Sales Cycle

Making Data Relevant: New Metrics for Social Marketing

Why We Invested in Groupon: The Power of Data

Two of the most popular services on the web are Facebook and Twitter, and the more popular these sites become the more valuable data skills are. Both of these sites produce massive amounts of data, and they also cater to developers to make the data open and accessible. What we need now is a simple tool for consumers to analyze and report on this data. A familiar interface might be a spreadsheet where users could quickly make calculations and summaries on a set of data. I think Google Spreadsheets is a good start, but limitations on the size of data sets and calls to web services prevent it from performing certain analyses.

What kind of tools do you use to analyze data on the web and what kinds of interesting applications have you seen from others?

So here’s what I did:

1. Opened a new Google Spreadsheet and wrote a formula to get all of the teams on one sheet. Each team in the league has a unique URL that displays their team information. So my team is located at http://games.espn.go.com/fba/clubhouse?leagueId=131029&teamId=1&seasonId=2011. All the other teams in the league can be found at the same URL, but the number after the “teamId=” is different.  The formula I need to use is the “importHTML” function in Google Docs.  This allows you to pull any data that’s visible online (and it will be updated every time you open the spreadsheet).  So here’s the function I write to get all of my players listed in my spreadsheet.

=importHTML(“http://games.espn.go.com/fba/clubhouse?leagueId=131029&teamId=1&seasonId=2011″,”table”,4)

Make sure to have the URL and table in quotes and the last number is just the number of the table on the page that you’d like to import if there are multiple tables on one web page.  Now I have all my players listed on my sheet and I’ll open a second sheet to bring in my rankings/prediction data.

2. I’ll write the same importHTML function to bring in the data from ESPN’s season predictions.  These are located at http://games.espn.go.com/fba/tools/projections?leagueId=131029.  I’ll write that same function:

=importHTML(“http://games.espn.go.com/fba/tools/projections?leagueId=131029″,”table”,0)

Now I have all of the projections in a second spreadsheet.  To overlay the projections on each team I’m going to have to write a vlookup query.  That means I’m asking the spreadsheet to find a player’s name from my team on the projections list and grab the total points from that same row.  So here’s what I’ll do in the first column next to my team data.

=vlookup(Cell with player’s name from my team, entire range of projections data, column with season projections, FALSE)

Then I’ll have projections for each player and I can sum them for each team so I know which teams in my league are the favorites and which ones might struggle.

If you’d like you can take a look at the fantasy basketball spreadsheet that I built for our league

1. Luck is a huge part of the game. You never know when some relatively unknown player is going to erupt for 150 receiving yards and 2 TD’s (like Austin Collie has twice in the first 3 weeks for the Colts) or that one of the preseason top 10 running backs would have less than 100 yards combined and 0 touchdowns after 3 weeks (Shonn Greene of the Jets).

2. Even though luck plays a big part you can dramatically increase your chances of being on the right side of luck if you have the right data available. Fantasy football is all about numbers and match-ups, and there are hundreds of decisions that need to be made throughout the season on who to start or who to potentially trade. Your chances of being lucky are much better when you make those decisions based on data rather than just a hunch every single time.

I’ve also realized that there really isn’t a way to have the information you need all in one place. It’s time-consuming to go back and forth between ESPN, Yahoo Fantasy Sports, team websites, etc. to gather the data you need to make decisions. That’s why I’ve created this fantasy football spreadsheet to act as a hub for all of my fantasy football decision making.

How To Use The Fantasy Football Data Hub

First things first, I want to make this tool available and useful to everyone.  I’ve built it using Google Spreadsheets, and the nice thing is that all of the data updates automatically week to week.  Here’s what you’ll need to do to use the fantasy football spreadsheet yourself:

1. Make sure you have a Google account (if you don’t have one you can sign up for free here)

2. Open the Fantasy Football Data Hub

3. Click File > Make a Copy so that you save your own version of the spreadsheet into your account. You won’t be able to edit the master sheet, but once you make a copy you’ll be able to put your own players and use all of the player comparison tools.

4. **Important** Read the “Week to Week” section below. It’s the only manual effort that you’ll have to make to get the data to display correctly.  If you don’t follow these instructions the data will be invalid after a week.

What Can You Do With The Fantasy Football Data Hub?

I’ve included several different fantasy football tools in the spreadsheet that should help you make decisions as the season goes on. Each tool is located on a different tab of the spreadsheet.  There are a few tabs that only  contain raw data and won’t be used, but they’re important to keep intact because the data feeds into all of the other tabs.  Here’s a list of the tools contained in the Fantasy Football Data Hub.

What To Watch For

This tool gives you a data driven perspective on which offenses or defenses you should look out for in the coming week.  It takes each matchup into account and looks for the biggest disparities in rank.  The first column (Defenses That Should Do Well) is based on scoring in past weeks.  Each team is ranked based on the total amount of points their defense has given up.  Then the matchup is taken into account by looking at the points per game of the opposing offense and displaying the defenses with the biggest difference in ranking against the opposing offense they’re playing.  So if the #28 defense is playing the #2 scoring offense they’re going to show up on the “Defenses to Avoid” list.

Top 20 Players This Week

This data is an aggregation of all of the top fantasy sports sites (ESPN, Yahoo, etc) and the projected points their analysts assign to each player.  This data comes from the brilliant work of the Fantasy Football Nerd at www.fantasyfootballnerd.com.  They should get all the credit for compiling these rankings, and I’ve simply displayed them here along with all of the other fantasy football tools in the spreadsheet.  These will be updated each week by Wednesday or Thursday so you might see errors or old data if you look at it on Monday or Tuesday.

Player Comparison

This tool allows you to quickly compare season stats on up to 13 players at once.  You’ll get projected stats for each week as well as cumulative season stats on fantasy points, touchdowns, passing, rushing, receiving yards etc.  This might be useful if you’re exploring potential trades and you want to see how a few different players have performed up to this point in the year.

Should I Start/Should I Trade?

Both of these tools allow you to input players into the boxes that you’re trying decide between.  The Should I Start? tool simply looks at the upcoming week and the data that FantasyFootballNerd.com aggregates.  It will return an answer and will show you how many points better that player will be for the week.  The Should I Trade? tool looks at total season data and the average amount of fantasy points each player has scored per week and let’s you know if you’re getting the better deal on the trade.  This tool doesn’t take into account your current lineup so the results might be skewed if you’re trading a running back for a wide receiver (since RB’s generally score more points than WR’s based on the scoring systems in fantasy football).  However, it will give you a quick idea of whether a trade is fair or not.

My Teams

On this tab you can input your League and Team ID’s of ESPN and Yahoo fantasy leagues so that you can import your own team data into the spreadsheet.  Currently the integration with ESPN works well, but the Yahoo import is not quite complete.  However, you can still manually input your own player names in the players column and the projected points will then appear.

To find your League ID and Team ID you’ll need to check the URL of the webpage you use to manage your team.  For ESPN leagues it should look like this:

The first box is your League ID and the second is the Team ID.  Those are the numbers you’ll need to plug into the spreadsheet.

For the Yahoo leagues (integration coming soon) it should look like this:

The red box is the League ID and the green is the Team ID.

This tool will give you a quick indication if any of the players that you have sitting on your bench should start (based on a higher projection that another player at the same position).

Breaking News

The breaking news tab is an RSS feed of all of the latest news, injury updates, and insider information that might affect the week’s fantasy football matchups.  This is compiled from Footballguys.com, and they do an amazing job of getting the latest information displayed immediately.  Here you can find their fantasy football RSS feed.

Week to Week

This tab is actually the most important part of the spreadsheet because it’s the one sheet that you have to manually change each week to make the data display correctly. Currently, the next week of the NFL season is at the top of this sheet.  In order for all of the data to work correctly you must make sure the next week is always at the top of this sheet.  Here’s what you’ll need to do.

Scroll down the spreadsheet to the next week (or whatever week is upcoming in the NFL season) and cut the entire chunk of rows and paste it into the top of the spreadsheet to replace the data from the old week.  Don’t replace the very top row with the headers, but take the row starting with “Week x” and all the way down through all of the games for that week.  So you cut the new data and paste into the top of the sheet and you’re good to go.

Make sure to leave all of the other tabs alone if you want the spreadsheet to work as it’s designed.  However, if you want to build your own formulas feel free to tweak the data.

I’d love to get your feedback on how you’ve used the Fantasy Football Data Hub, and any feature requests you might have.  I plan to continually develop the tool to use in my own fantasy football leagues so look for additional tools and features over the next couple of months.

Think about it: Major League Baseball is ungodly long. Teams routinely give players days off when they’re not injured just because there are so many games. Only 8 teams make the playoffs so half the league is playing for nothing before the All-Star break. The NBA and NHL are also too long. Single games mean nothing through the course of the year so it’s not a big deal if a team loses one. And seriously…2 months to get through the playoffs? College football is on the opposite spectrum. If you’re a national title contender and you lose the first game…you’re done. It doesn’t matter if you win every other game by 50 for the rest of the year. There are still going to be two teams that go undefeated and they’re going to play for the championship. And of course the post-season in college football is beyond bad with the BCS and all the random bowl games. The NFL is probably the only other sport that comes close to college basketball. My only problem with the NFL is that the games are only on Sunday/Monday. The rest of the week is just dead.

Now take college basketball. Each team plays about 30-35 games so every game truly matters. So you can’t have a bad streak and lose 4 in a row (which wouldn’t be a big deal in MLB/NBA/NHL) and expect to have a great year, but you know that everyone is going to lose at some point so 1 loss at the beginning of the regular season doesn’t ruin the whole year. You have games almost every day of the week, major upsets where fans rush the floor, parity to the point that anyone can win on a given night, and new superstars emerging every year. Plus, I think everyone can agree that there’s not a more exciting week in sports than the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. The NCAA tournament is without question the best event in sports. No other event can stir up that many different emotions from everyone involved. I seriously get goosebumps every single time I watch the One Shining Moment videos from 2005 and 2009 when my Tar Heels won it all. It won’t do much if you’re not a UNC fan, but try watching the video from when your team wins. If you don’t get a little emotional then you’re probably not a real fan.

Now, on to my second point (which was going to be the original point of this post until I felt compelled to justify my thoughts on college basketball).  Tom Izzo is considering taking the head coaching job of the Cleveland Cavaliers.  Tom has won a national championship with Michigan State, and taken his team to the Final Four in 6 of the last 11 years.  Every player that he has recruited that has completed their full eligibility has gotten an opportunity to play in the Final Four.  The thing is, MSU wasn’t that good in at least 2 of their Final Four runs – getting there as a 5-seed twice.  Izzo was great at getting his team to play it’s best when it counted and became a master of the back-to-back format of the tournament because of his thorough preparation.  Plus, he makes 3 million/yr and has an incredibly talented team coming back to play next year.  He’s only won once in 6 trips to the Final Four so he has some unfinished business there that I’m sure he’d like to clean up.  Oh, and one other thing.  Michigan State is known to run nearly a hundred different set plays that Izzo orchestrates.  In order to succeed in Izzo’s system his players have to know what their role is on every different set play.

Now, take everything you now know about Tom Izzo and tell me why he thinks going to coach the Cleveland Cavaliers would be a good idea.  Ok, if Lebron James stays in Cleveland, than yes Lebron alone makes it a good idea.  If that’s the case then I can understand Izzo’s thinking.  But Lebron hasn’t given any indication that he wants to stay in Cleveland.  Plus, you’d think that Cleveland management would at least consult Lebron on the new coach if he’ll be staying, but clearly they have not.

My question is : Why would Tom Izzo succeed in the NBA?  Do you think the 1-on-1, streetball mentality of NBA players is going to fit well with Izzo’s huge list of set plays?  Has any other college coach actually done well in the NBA? (Calipari -no, Pitino – no, Donovan-quit before he started) Is Izzo going to be able to mow through the NBA playoffs like he did the NCAA tournament when it’s so drawn out that it gives everyone more than enough time to prepare?

I just see the move as a bad idea for Izzo, a bad move for the Cavs, and a disappointing blow to Michigan State.  Nobody is a winner there except Izzo’s bank account, and that’s already doing just fine.

So Tom you have the opportunity to become one of the also-ran college-turned-NBA coaches, or you have the chance to become one of the best college basketball coaches ever.  I think it’s an easy choice.

Zankit is an online classifieds marketplace where anyone can share listings to their social networks on Facebook and Twitter.  If your link produces the buyer you earn a referral commission.  Now you can have thousands of people helping you sell your big-ticket item like a car or a condo rental.  They’re happy to do it because they know they can make some money if someone from their network buys the item.

Take a look at our Zankit demo video to get a better understanding of the full experience.

I also learned a few things at Startup Weekend that were pretty cool.  First, web development skills are definitely not a commodity that can simply be outsourced.  The development guys on our team did some amazing work in a short period of time.  They formed the plan for the site and then executed on everything.  Being able to design the functionality of the site, and then build everyone of those features is definitely not a skill that many people have.  Second, you can accomplish a lot more in a short period of time than you think when you bring people together with different disciplines that are committed to the same goal.  While the developers were hard at work building the features, the marketing team was busy creating content around our brand, scripting and producing our demo video, and designing the look and feel of the site.  It all came together in our final presentation, and it felt pretty cool to show off our new business to all the other teams.

I’m looking forward to pushing Zankit forward.  Let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback!

“Each evening, pick six things to do tomorrow. Then do those things.”

That is absolutely the most important part of being productive.  I find that sometimes I go through the day completely distracted because there aren’t any pressing items on my to-do list, and the things that I am doing might be boring or monotonous.  However, when I have a list in front of me of 3-5 that I absolutely need to get done that day I’m much more focused and when something gets boring I can jump to the next task on my list and work on that for a while, but I don’t really lose any productivity.  Ok, enough of the conceptual stuff – onto the tools that I’ve been using.  Here are the tools that I’ve worked into my system.

1. Gmail

2. Remember the Milk (w/Gmail gadget)

3. Google Calendar

4. Motorola Droid phone (w/Remember the Milk app)

That’s my basic view that I keep open in my browser the entire day.  (side note: If you need to log in to multiple Google accounts throughout the day the best way to do that is to open an “Incognito” window with Google Chrome so that you can log into your second Google account without logging yourself out of the first.  Simply click on Tools or File and then “New Incognito Window.”)

Task Management – Remember the Milk

You’ll see on the bottom left I’ve added the Remember the Milk Gmail gadget to my Gmail screen.  To do this click on settings in Gmail and then labs.  You’ll want to enable the labs project that’s titled “Add any Gadget by URL.”  While you’re there you might want to also enable a few more gadgets like “Enable Right-Side Chat” and “Drag-and-drop labels.”  These 2 give you more room and flexibility on where your gadgets will sit on your screen.

After you’ve enabled the gadgets you can go to the Remember the Milk Gmail Settings page for full instructions on how to add it to your dashboard.

Google Calendar

The next item that I included on my Gmail screen was my Google Calendar.  Unfortunately, you can’t see it on the screenshot because it’s below the fold and I have to scroll down to see the whole thing.  It would be great if Google allowed right side gadgets (besides chat).  Apparently this used to be possible, but Google decided to ditch the feature.  Clearly, the bottom right of my screen is wasted space and it would be nice to have my calendar right there in plain view.  Nevertheless it’s still helpful to have my list of meetings and commitments right there on my screen without having to go into the separate Calendar application.

Mobile Access

Having all my information with me on the go is huge for me since I’m on my Droid quite a bit.  That’s a big reason why I chose Remember the Milk because their Android application is extremely good.  I have one-click access to all my tasks, events, and email messages right there on my phone.

Previously, I had been using Google Tasks for my to-do list.  I liked it a lot and I had a free application that synced with my phone.  However, I found myself just building item after item on my list that didn’t really have high priority.  With Remember the Milk I can easily separate tasks into different lists and differentiate by date.  This is where I’ve been utilizing the 5 daily tasks idea and making sure to get those 5 tasks done each day.

Like I mentioned before, it’s not necessarily the technology that will make you productive, but finding a system that works for you and then sticking to it.  How do you make sure you’re getting things done?

The verdict: I haven’t used my browser any differently than before.

When I would get a chance to play with a friends’ iPhone or when I went in an Apple store to test it out myself I always thought the web browsing was pretty awkward.  I got the hang of it, but I hated having to use 2 hands to zoom in on an object, and half the time my zoom attempts became clicks.  It was kind of a mess.  I’m sure I would get used to it if I used it all the time, but it just seemed somewhat clunky to me.  When I got my Motorola Droid I was pretty happy that there was no multi-touch browsing in the beginning.  To zoom in I simply tapped the + sign that appeared at the very bottom edge of the screen, and likewise on the – when I wanted to zoom out.  It was simple, and even though the button would occasionally get in the way of the page content it was a very rare occurence.  The best thing was that I could operate everything with one hand without having to awkwardly strain my fingers to make a pinch or zoom with one hand.

I haven’t figured out why so many people are crazy about multi-touch mobile browsing.  Is it just because the iPhone had it from the beginning and everyone got so used to an iPhone.  It was weird to me that so many Android fans complained about the lack of multi-touch support and then rejoiced when it finally came. Oh well, I’ll go ahead and keep happily using my single touch browser.

For example, when I listen to Pandora now in my broswer every time a new song comes on I get a message about which one of my friends “likes” this artist.  This is currently pulling from the “Interests” section of their profiles.  It’s somewhat interesting to see what my friends musical tastes are – especially at a time when I’m thinking about music and am engaged in listening to a song.

I think this concept is great, and I’ll be excited to see more sites implement the tools that Facebook is providing.  What I have a problem with though is that Facebook says it will serve 1 Billion “Like’s” in the first 24 hours.  That’s a pretty huge number, and I just don’t see how you can convincingly claim that anything would happen a billion times on the first day it’s available.  You just can’t expect users to completely understand it right away and start using it the way you expect.

Even with huge partners like ESPN, CNN, Yelp, etc it would be difficult to get to a billion in one day.

Take a look at Compete.com’s data for some of the big partners that Facebook is brining on at launch.  These are all massive sites, but they still only reach a combined 75 million visitors per month.  That’s really only 2-3 million per day.  If only half the visitors used any kind of new “Like” button – that would mean each user would need to do so 1,000 times…in 1 day.

Looking at the math from another way – Facebook has about 400 million users.  Let’s say 200 million of them are actually on Facebook at some point today.  Every single one of those users would need to “Like” 5 different things…in one day.

I’d love to see the actual statistics on how this goes for Facebook.  I’m sure it will eventually be a huge development for the web I think the 1 Billion “Like’s” in one day is a little bit unrealistic for now.

Although I haven’t seen the Facebook integration on ESPN yet, I did my part by hitting the like button on a few new songs in Pandora.  So far that’s the only site involved that I use regularly and would actually contribute anything meaningful.