People tend to get excited every time one of these records fall - already in 2012, the second and third most tweeted about events of all time have been recorded (the start of the New Year in Japan weighed in at 16,127 tweets per second and crashed Twitter's servers). But as I watch stories about each record falling, I can hear the words of my very first editor at the very first newspaper I worked at.

"So what?"

Because that editor was the kind of guy who didn't like to waste readers' times with non-news stories. When someone told us something was a story, he questioned it. And the Twitter record stories, which happen every few months or even every few weeks, are worth questioning.

The oldest event on the Top 10 list was in May 2011 -- Barcelona defeating Manchester United is still holding in at number nine. No Japanese Earthquake, no Arab Spring, and no death of Osama bin Laden. Even the death of Steve Jobs, now at number 10, is one big event away from falling off the top 10 list.

And here's why: Twitter is still growing, and more people using Twitter means more people tweeting about the big (and not-so-big) events that tie us together. We all know this, yet we all seem to collectively forget that when we rush to read or cover the latest X-number of tweets per second event.

Last March, as the company marked its fifth anniversary, Twitter said it had about 100 million active users logging in each month. Twitter users were sending about a billion tweets per week; compare that to the the three years, two months and one day it took Twitter to record its first billion tweets.

At some point Twitter will hit a critical mass and its growth will level off. And the current marker of a once-in-a-lifetime event - the "I remember where I was when I first heard about..." factor may very well be replaced someday with the "I remember what I tweeted when I first heard about...."

Until then, however, these tweets-per-second records are going to continue be interesting side notes. But are they really worth the more than 5,000 news stories and blog posts that have been written about Tebow's record-breaking performance since Sunday night?

Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

In this post we tell you how to monitor the Rugby World Cup online, using a range of impressive official websites and social media accounts.

The official site is also a good place to check out video coverage of the games, with full match coverage available on past games. Note that there is a 72 hour delay in the USA, presumably due to TV rights. Although in our tests, none of the videos seemed to work in the US. So your mileage may vary. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like, in case you can't see the videos right now:

For further video content, the RWC YouTube channel offers a daily 5-6 minute news round-up. Below is the latest one at time of writing.

The RWC Facebook Page has 1.3 million 'likes' so far and is a good place to discuss the games with other fans. There are currently over 300 comments on the South Africa vs. Wales match.

Rugby fans may also want to check out the extra features in the Facebook Page menu, including separate pages for Discussions and Events.

The official Twitter account has nearly 75,000 followers at this stage. It's an active account, with helpful updates and even match scores. The official hashtag is #rwc2011. In addition, you can follow Twitter lists for teams and players.

For a flavor of the atmosphere around New Zealand as the RWC plays out, check out the official Flickr account.

There are a number of RWC mobile apps available, including for iPhone/iPad, Android phones, Blackberry and more.

Finally, if you'd like a calendar of the games for Google Calendar, Outlook and more, local rugby fan Mike Riversdale has created a few options.

Overall, the online coverage of the Rugby World Cup is comprehensive and makes excellent use of social media. Other than some issues with watching video from the U.S. and perhaps other countries, the online presence for RWC2011 is more than satisfactory.

As the founder of ReadWriteWeb and the company's only kiwi (I live and work from New Zealand), I can't resist finishing this round-up by stating: GO THE ALL BLACKS! It's about time we lifted the World Cup again, it's only been 24 years :)

Disney and TNT are currently half-way through 8 year contracts with the NBA for an undisclosed sum that will conclude with the 2015-2016 season. Google began covering live cricket matches in India last year and another company staff member told Business Week's Jun Yang that "It's fair to say that there will be a lot more appealing sports content you'll see on YouTube." Live NBA games though? That would be insane. Such is the nature of the media disruption underway, though, is it not? Update: Staci Kramer at Paid Content got a denial from the NHL and asserts that NBA talks were only regarding broadcast in Asia. If that's the case, that's too bad.

This Summer, YouTube announced it would broadcast every Major League Baseball game of the next season in Japan, but 36 hours after the game was over. None the less, that deal was called by the company "the largest partnership for premium sports content" in its history.

Sports are high value content and live sports even more so. Across media types and across international borders, things get very, very complicated. Could Google steal the show from incumbent big-ticket TV broadcasters? If anyone could, it's the sprawling and deep-pocketed search, video and advertising giant.

It's entirely possible that one international Google team member made a passing comment that the Business Week reporter blew out of proportion and then put into a convenient context with other comments not intended to reflect on the ultimate subject of that publication's article. Entirely possible. It is, however, probably impossible that YouTube is not in fact talking to the NBA and other sports leagues whenever it has a chance to do so.

If I was a TV exec sitting on 4 years of multibillion dollar sports broadcasting rights, I'd be pretty concerned about what the internet was going to bring to the bidding game once that contract nears its conclusion.

Oh, for the days of "Broadcast Yourself." They certainly are long gone.

YouTube hasn't yet responded to our request for comment.

Update: A YouTube spokesperson replied to our request for comment and said "we don't have anything more to add at this time than what appeared in the BW story."

If you're a sports fan, then you know how difficult it can be to keep track of all the games without missing the best ones. Without a room full of screens, it can be all too easy to watch one defensive snoozer while an action packed display of offense is happening on another channel. Or maybe you know the feeling of skipping out on watching a game because you think it will be boring and it turns out to be the one everyone is talking about for the next week.

One startup has decided to make sure you're never "the loser at the water cooler the next day that missed an Instant Classic." With a name your buddy might shout from the other room, "Are You Watching This?!" can make sure you're never that loser and its vision for the future should be exciting for any television viewer, especially sports fans.

RUWT CEO and founder, Mark Phillip, told us that this is the site he has always wished existed as a sports fan.

"I always hated the thought of going to bed and missing the game," he said. "It's that average Tuesday that you're not thinking of sports that you'll get a message saying 'there's a no-hitter through eight on ESPN, turn to channel 208.'"

According to Philip, there is an overwhelming number of games available on TV on any given day, with one in four days having more than 100 sporting events. (One record day last fall had an incredible 510 games in a single day.) For true sports fans, it's impossible to keep track of, but that's where RUWT comes in. The RUWTbot keeps track of all the games, pays attention to your settings, and alerts you when a game reaches the level of awesomeness you deem worthy of your attention.

The bot, Philip told us, "is getting smart enough to understand rivalries, but it's cold and objective. It treats playoff games the same as regular season games." To temper that, the site's 17,000 users can all contribute to ranking games by ranking them on a scale from "okay" to "good" to "hot" to "epic".

"It's this mix of an objective signal plus a subjective signal," he explained. "Okay" and "good" may be worth watching if you're already watching TV, he explained, but "if a game gets to hot, it's worth turning the TV on for. If it gets to epic, it's the game that everyone's going to be talking about the next day."

After you sign up with RUWT, you can fully customize at what level a game needs to hit for the bot to alert you, for what leagues and whether by email, SMS, or both.

The RUWTbot keeps track of scores, news and TV listings for Arena Football, Auto Racing (NASCAR, F1, IRL), Men's College Basketball, Women's College Basketball, College Football, MLB, NBA, NFL, CFL, NHL, Soccer (MLS and World Cup), and the WNBA, pulling in from one half to a full gigabyte of sports data daily. As information arrives, the bot can generally score a game in less than 100 milliseconds, Philip told us, meaning that the literal second a game gets good, you can know about it.

Philip said that the service is already available as an app on Google TV and that he's been talking to a number of hardware manufactures about getting it embedded in set-top boxes and other devices, such as the SlingBox.

"I think its a really interesting fit - the ability to sling content to wherever you are is great, but what if you don't know the game is on?" asked Philip. The answer, of course, is that a SlingBox integration could not only alert you that your favorite team was doing something great, but it could bring the game to you on your mobile device, wherever you are.

As a NY Giants and Texas Longhorns fan living in California, I can tell you this would be a service I'd be willing to pay for. For now, however, I won't have to, because RUWT comes as a free app on a variety of devices. And if Philip has his way, RUWT will soon come integrated on the devices already sitting in your living room and hooked up to your TV. I can't wait.

"Yes, Onion Sports Network and #SportsDome now own #BCS. Take that, Tostitos" is the text of the sponsored tweet that will sit on top of Twitter conversation about the game tomorrow. The Frito-Lay Tostitos brand corn chips are the official sponsor of the Bowl Championship Series. If it's a social media world, the college football establishment may have just gotten upstaged.

Can the Onion do sports? For the show to launch with a promotion like this on Twitter bodes well. It also bodes well for the sense of humor in the Twitter advertising department.

When Twitter launched its sponsored trends advertising product in June, we called it a brave new type of advertising. Not every potential advertiser will feel comfortable calling attention to free-form Tweets that could say anything about them. Apparently if you don't buy a trend about your organization or event, though, The Onion might buy it themselves.

Disclosure: This post's author is an Oregon grad, but will be cheering for The Onion durring the big game.

Beginning today, nearly 350 Division 1 college basketball teams will receive constant, in-depth coverage of their season in what the company is calling "the world's first network of websites driven entirely by high-quality, automated content".

StatSheet Founder and CEO Robbie Allen told us by email that "This is truly a first in the media world - every site will be updated in real time with long form narrative content generated automatically from our system and at no incremental cost to us."

The effort will be driven by real-time sports statistics and a database of more than 500 million statistics. Each teams site will not only include these automated articles, but photo and video highlights, its own Twitter account, Facebook Fan Page and mobile application.

"For many of these teams (like Lamar)," wrote Allen, "this will be the first time their fans will have access to the kind of comprehensive coverage typically afforded only to the top programs (like UNC)."

To take a look at some robot-generated journalism, go ahead and visit StatSheet and take a gander.

Allen assured us last time we spoke with him that he wasn't trying to replace human reporters, but simply augment their coverage.

"There are going to be times that any writer can outperform a computer," he said, "but when you look at the breadth it's going to be hard to beat a computer."

The Major League Baseball playoffs are going on right now and millions of people are unable to watch them due to the contract conflict. The official FCC Twitter account is posting live game updates along with calls on the companies to settle their dispute.

There's something about these old media rules and relationships that just seem absurd when new media makes so much more possible.

By holding the phone up and looking around with the camera, users can view information about the tournament - including live scores, food menus, transportation, first-aid and restroom locations - in real-time AR perspective. Fans of augmented reality may not be blown away by this implementation, but the exposure for the technology from the tournament and from IBM is significant.

Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships, was interviewed recently (see embedded video below) by Fox Business's Brian Sullivan who asked, "What's in it for IBM?" Singer notes that IBM can show to its clients that the company is on the cutting edge and experimenting with new technologies, but he also very succinctly summed up why AR is important.

"This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions."

Making better decisions with more useful aggregation and presentation of data. Now that's a great slogan for augmented reality!

Both apps leverage a database that contains GPS data for each hole on over 33,000 courses across the globe. Based on the user's location as determined by the phone's GPS, the apps can provide highly accurate distance estimations to various points on the course, including greens, bunkers, doglegs and layup points. Golfscape takes it a step further, however, providing this information in a heads-up AR view.

So how well does it work? During my testing while playing nine holes with my father, we were both very impressed with app's ability to accurately determine our distance from various landmarks on each hole. The app tells you how strong your GPS signal is and will adjust the range of its estimates accordingly, but in most cases the app was very accurate.

At one point I held my phone up, pointed it at the green and waited a few moments for the app to zero in on my distance. Eventually it settled on 73 yards. I looked around on the course for a sprinkler head, which normally has the distance written on it, and there just so happened to be one right next to where I was standing. It had the number "73" written on it.

As for the heads-up augmented reality view, the app does a decent job of displaying the information in perspective, but it could be better. The app wasn't always accurate in pointing out where the center of the green was, and when panning the phone side to side, the data would skip around the screen. Unlike some other apps, Golfscape is not yet taking advantage of the iPhone 4's added gyroscope, which provides a far smoother AR experience.

The other problem is not so much one with the app but with the use of smartphones outdoors. The iPhone's glass screen makes viewing the information very difficult to do on a sunny day, though holding the phone up in the AR view does help avoid some of the glare and brightness problems.

The app defintely has the wow factor that is sure to impress your less tech-savvy golfer friends, but I would suggest sticking with the $29.99 Golfshot app that includes so much more functionality. For just $10 more than Golfscape, you get the same highly accurate GPS distances, plus score keeping and stat tracking - just no fancy AR view.

If anything, Golfscape is a fun app to show off and a great way to explain the complicated field of augmented reality to a layperson. The app sparked interesting dinner conversations that left random family members with a piqued interest in augmented reality. The Ben & Jerry's AR app didn't hurt their interest either, and it is that interest that will help push AR into the mainstream.

Univision Promises 900 Hours of Coverage

Univision.com is an official internet broadcaster of the World Cup and is offering live streaming of all 64 matches. On average a quarter of a million people in the U.S. and Puerto Rico are watching live streams of each match. These streams have helped drive 16 million page views to Univision's interactive media platform, including mobile and mobile apps. Its Soccer App also recently became the second most popular free app in the iPhone store.

World Cup on Twitter

Facebook Coverage

As always Facebook is in the thick of it with its campaign to get you to like everything. Facebook's sports page has a passion rank, which currently puts Chile's victory over Honduras in the number one spot. Almost a half a million people have liked Chile's World Cup profile. And in related soccer-passion news, Chile's capitol city of Santiago used tear gas and water cannons to disperse celebrants and arrest 81. This year is the first time in 48 years that Chile has won a World Cup match!

World Cup on ESPN/ABC

The match between England vs. the U.S. drew 16 million viewers, and became the fifth most popular World Cup match ever covered by U.S. television. Complimenting this coverage was 1.7 million visitors to the ESPN website during the first four days. Of additional interest is analysis that indicates multi-platform users who switch between TV, radio, mobile and the Web are engaged for five times longer than those who only watch on TV.

Flood of Soccer Apps

Of course this roundup would not be complete if we didn't mention the huge flood of Phone and iPad apps that are begin offered. The number of people trying to get us to promote their World Cup apps has skyrocketed. And while there are plenty of top World Cup app posts out there, I would only recommend one: the Vuvuzela iPhone app. It's currently the number one free soccer app at the iTunes store. Even though this app is only capable of emitting 90 decibels (a real Vuvuzela horn hits 130), in the hands of a small child this app could be almost as annoying as all the Vuvuzela haters combined.

People have been talking about robot reporters for years, but sports coverage is a logical, structured field for it to happen in and StatSheet says it will soon bring a product to market.

StatSheet today offers embeddable statistics to sports media sites around the web. The company licenses bulk stats from a vendor and then analyzes that data to draw out higher-level insights. Allen says the next logical step is to build narrative prose around those insights. Once he's got the tools built to narrate one game, there's zero marginal cost to apply them to hundreds of college basketball teams around the country. Many of those teams are small enough that they don't get much attention from human reporters, Allen contends.

Human reporters know a team and a season, but Allen says they also "have their scripts written." "They already think they know what to look at as the most interesting things that have happened," he says. "I'm talking about codifying that knowledge, to build a wider corpus of interesting facts to draw from."

Even if at any given moment a human can generally beat a machine writer, "in many ways this going to surpass a lot of the sports media that is out there," Allen says. "There are going to be times that any writer can outperform a computer, but when you look at the breadth it's going to be hard to beat a computer."

Allen says he's not trying to replace human sports writers, just to augment their coverage. Sports media organizations are currently limited by the number of people they can throw at a league and at statistical analysis. There's no reason not to automate much of that work, he says.

Traditionalists might doubt that the writing could possibly be as good, but a look at excerpts generated from a competing academic project called StatsMonkey makes robot reporters look pretty capable of the basics.

An outstanding effort by Willie Argo carried the Illini to an 11-5 victory over the Nittany Lions on Saturday at Medlar Field.

Argo blasted two home runs for Illinois. He went 3-4 in the game with five RBIs and two runs scored.

Illini starter Will Strack struggled, allowing five runs in six innings, but the bullpen allowed only no runs and the offense banged out 17 hits to pick up the slack and secure the victory for the Illini.

The Illini turned the game into a rout with four in the ninth inning.

That's not perfect, but it's pretty good! It's quite basic, too. It will be interesting to see how much more StatSheet can offer in its robot coverage. Allen says he's having a lot of fun building out complex flow charts and tracking for statistical anomalies.

"It's going to follow a standard disruptive curve," StatsSheet's Allen told us, "maybe version one will be a little rough but there will be plenty of opportunity and incentive for improvement. It's not like an algorithm is going to have writer's block."

He says he plans on offering a variety of writing voices to interpret the facts of a game in. Readers or publications could choose between the "over the top" vs the "subtle" coverage, for example, depending on their tastes.

There's all kinds of artistic and ethical ways to consider this vision. Will Google punish these non-human content creators? Should it? If a reporter breaks a news scoop, is its engineer responsible for making sure it protects its sources? How will an athlete feel when they graduate from a minor sports league covered by machine media into the big time and a human sports reporter's beat? "They may be disappointed," Allen quips, "because the coverage may not be as good."

YouTube streaming live sporting events? That could really shake things up. The UK Guardian said today that the deal is "casting into doubt the value of British TV broadcast rights." Contrast this cricket deal with Major League Baseball's $110 per year online subscription service.

At a time when late night talk show hosts in the US are battling it out for TV time slots, news like this is just one more reason to wonder how long it will be until more big-ticket cultural phenomena move beyond seeing the web as a sideshow for stirring up popular support ("I'm with CoCo" Twitter avatars, etc.). Will there will be a major exodus onto the web as the main stage? TV execs have got to be feeling nervous.

For the rest of us, for media consumers, a post-scarcity media landscape where competition for viewers isn't made easy by captive audiences and advertisers could be a very good future. Of course the future is hard to predict, people thought television was going to be a major force for democracy.

Live sports and other events on the internet could very well prove to be for consumers, as they say in cricket, a batsman's paradise.

Augmented Reality (AR) is technology that places data on top of our view of the world around us. The first World Cup 2010 AR made an appearance at a small event in London last week.

It's not terribly interactive, but it is a fascinating experiment in trying to build international camaraderie by making fans imagine themselves as if they were fans of another country's team. How would they feel if they had that other country's flag painted on their faces and heard its national anthem? Were they from that country, they would probably feel proud. How does the AR make them feel? Perhaps like a more worldly, sympathetic person. That sounds like a positive World Cup experience.

We're told that the system was built by long-time Augmented Reality market leader Total Immersion, in partnership with CrossPlatform.tv. The face being augmented is Simon Grice, founder of MashupEvent. The screenshot was sent to us by "an anonymous source, who was very impressed."

Who's World Cup AR will we see next and what will it do? We look forward to seeing the world's most popular sport become an experience all the richer.

According to a memo sent out to teams today, no mobile or other communication devices are to be used from 45 minutes before a game starts until after the players have finished performing their athletic duties, including postgame locker room interviews. The ban affects players, coaches, and "basketball operations personnel." We are unclear whether cheerleaders are included in this perplexingly named category.

The complete list of NBA players affected by this decision is staggering, but the ban also applies to other forms of social media, such as Facebook status updates. It would even prohibit the sending of text messages and emails during the prescribed time limits.

And although tweeting on the job is generally considered bad form, like all Twitter users who choose to make their professional lives part of their social stream, these NBA players are doing monumental things for engagement, brand ambassadorship, and real-time promotion. We consider the NBA's decision to make basketball less fun short-sighted and generally uncool.

However, the memo may be welcomed by many coaches and other team executives, who often prohibit the use of electronic communication devices at various times during team activities. Teams such as the L.A. Clippers and the Miami Heat already have guidelines in place that are much stricter than what was outlined in the NBA memo.

Many thanks to Mathew Ingram for the pointer and for inspiring our headline.

Does the NBA's call make sense to you? Or did the out-of-touch leadership go over the line? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Would you pay a premium for an event ticket that includes real time stats like that delivered to your iPhone? I would. Of course Apple is granted all kinds of patents all the time and only some of them amount to anything - but this one is very cool.

Call it augmented reality, call it ubiquitous wearable computing, call it Web 3.0 if you must. It's widely believed that networks of sensors feeding data into computers for analysis and visualization are going to be a big thing in the near term future. Value-adds built on top of that data hold huge potential for the development of software we can't even imagine today. This vision is big in the electrical utility world, but private sector innovators are being hampered by the lack of vision seen in public utility companies. When it comes to the world of sports, the sky could be the limit. Imagine attending a sporting event and being able to select from a variety of apps for the app store, built just for that kind of sport.