(DA -- This is a sponsored post.)

Along with many other writers on SBN blogs, I've spent the past two Fridays telling you how technology affects my sports-fan life, as prompted by the Samsung Corporation. Amazingly, the Samsung board of directors has been so pleased with the information SBN has offered them that they've decided to go on a tour of U.S. sports cities to ask us, personally, what's important to them. They've already visited Ben, proprietor of BlazersEdge, and I'm next on the list, probably because CEO Gee-Sung Choi is anxious to see the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

In any event, I'd like to go beyond teling them my theories about cell phones and video games -- in fact, I want to go beyond talking about what already is, and mine your ideas for the next step in sports fan technology. I mean, if I'm going to have an audience with the Samsung board of directors, I've gotta make the most of it. I know there are a lot of creative people who read Rufus on Fire, so let's brainstorm some brilliant innovations for cell phones, television, and the in-arena experience.

My (abbreviated) technology wish list is as follows:

1 -- Figure out a way I can turn off all announcers from television broadcasts and only hear the sounds of the game. As a corollary, figure out a way to broadcast TV shows and events with hundreds of different audio channel options. For sports, specifically, there could be the Official Broadcast Team, and then people who pay to broadcast their versions of events, whether it has to do with the game or not. If you pay for it, you get the audio channel. Good luck.

2 -- Mic up every player, and provide NASCAR-like radios for fans to rent, so they can listen to anyone, coach, player, official, or radio broadcast, all game. (Second stock car reference!)

3 -- Put a chip in the ball. Place a chip on every player. Track everything they do on the court or field, and make that data publicly available for free or low-cost.

(DA -- This is a sponsored post.)

The current generation of young adult sports fans are either afflicted by, or have the advantage of, having played video games most of their lives. Whether you ran back to the one yard line before weaving 99 yards through the defense with Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl or dunked from half court in NBA Jam*, I suspect the vast majority of the 40-and-under crowd have undergone the fantasy of controlling modern day supermen via the console game medium.

This has implications for our sports fandom worth exploring.

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(DA -- This is a sponsored post.)

Growing up, my family tended to be late adopters when it came to technology. I'm not talking about GPS devices, PDAs, or other luxury gadgets -- I mean the basic stuff people my age and socio-economic class took for granted, like a clothes dryer or CD player, neither of which we had until the late 1990s. I think as a result, I'm the kind of guy who loved having an MP3 player for the first three weeks, but slowly stopped using it. After I realized I hadn't fired it up in six months, I gave it to the Official Fiancee of Rufus on Fire and haven't missed it since.

So, it's no surprise that I didn't get my first cell phone until my second year in college (Christmas, 2002), and waited until earlier this year to purchase a phone with capabilities beyond making calls and texting. Perhaps this is an obvious result to many of you, but having a phone with internet access has changed my life.

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