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.

The World Series of Poker is a 39 year old annual event where thousands of professional and amateur poker players fight through 40 tournaments for tens of millions of dollars in prize money. The event is different this year, because Twitter has come to the world of poker and it's changing the way the whole industry relates to the game.

We talked about all this disruption with Joe Sebok, a poker player, the CEO of the Poker Road news site and a man with almost 330,000 people following him on Twitter. (He met with Twitter's business development department and while they wouldn't cut an official deal with him - they did put him on Twitter's high profile Suggested Users List.) All the major poker news sites are racing to integrate Twitter and Sebok says his site isn't one of the biggest - but as far as we can tell, Poker Road's use of Twitter during the World Series of Poker may be defining the state of the art better than anyone else in the industry.

"It's completely changing poker for the audience," Sebok says of Twitter. "Traditional poker media coverage is a lot of hand histories online. It's bland and basic. Now you get to hear players exclaim and interact - 'oh I feel so sick' or 'oh that player is a knucklehead.' They upload pictures and they reply to each other. It gives you a sense of the pressure these guys are under and what it's like to be here."

Poker is a psychological game - and you can imagine how the pros are strategizing about their use of this new method of communication.

"People are calling it Tweet bluffing," Sebok says. "It's a game within a game situation and it's effected the way the games go. It's enabling the fans at home to climb into the minds of the players but if they are smart they know they can climb into each others' minds too: to see who tilts, who rolls with the bad situations and who flies off the handle. Players spread misinformation like 'I'm going to play tight' when they are really going to play loose. We do that verbally but since Twitter is written, it seems more believable. But it's just the beginning of all this, it's blown up in last 2 or 3 months."

As if cautious that his enthusiasm could rock a boat that's fun to ride, Sebok also tempers his assessment of the new medium's impact, saying that "it's mostly a way to communicate with the larger community, but it's raised some questions about changing the game. Ultimately, I think if it's a tweet or a conversation out loud it's the same. As long as it's not within a hand the players can use their phones and the World Series has been pretty receptive. They haven't made any rules saying you need to get up or leave the room."

Big name players are Tweeting but small timers at the big show are too. Traditional poker reporting didn't shed much light on the experiences of amateurs, but Sebok says those players on the margins can now tell their families and friends to check Twitter for hand by hand accounts of their experiences in Vegas.

Sebok's company doesn't just point its audience at players' Tweets, though. Simple aggregators of messages from players are available elsewhere. His Poker Road Nation site adds several layers of value on top of the flow of messages. It marks up through hashtags and manual categorization each tournament and game for sorting. It shows threaded conversations. It lets site visitors login to Twitter and post live replies to the players right on the Poker Road Nation site. "Inline replies is the most exciting part to me." Sebok says. Soon, the site will add inline photo display and an in-house video hosting and embedding feature. It's an operation so full-featured that anyone interested in Twitter aggregation can appreciate it, whether you're a poker fan or not.

Sebok is a Berkley grad who crashed and burned through the dotcom era but aims to bring the best parts of a dotcom mentality to the world of poker media. Poker reporter Jeff Holsey approached him early this year with a proposed design for a Twitter section of the Poker Road site. The company already had a popular podcast and Sebok was very interested in trying to do Twitter integration well.

"Jeff said poker coverage could be done more effectively if it came from the players themselves," Sebok remembers. "He is always pushing the envelope. Even though reporting on poker is his job, he's always looking for the next thing."

Should journalists in this field not worry that direct public communication from the players, the sources, could threaten their professional reporting jobs? "They should look at how this will supplement their jobs," Sebok says. "Their jobs will change but not disappear. We can look at interviews to support those tweets we see, for example. It falls on us to figure out how this won't kill us, but it's going to change everything."

It's a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially - hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There's OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it's just great. It's still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today - we're impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.

The Adobe Flash charts that StatPlot produces are even nicer, but they aren't easy to scale down to the size I needed.

The whole StatSheet franchise is an interesting one to watch. See TechCrunch's recent coverage of the company's tussle with Twitter over innovation on that platform.

Bring on the huge data sets and easy charting interfaces! We'd love to see a little of that action over at Data.gov, for example. Heck, let's see these kinds of options put on top of the forthcoming ClearSpring API tracking hundreds of millions of peoples' sharing activities online.

As StatSheet said on its blog today: "There are other services (Swivel, iCharts.net, Many-Eyes) that allow you to upload data and create a variety of visualizations, but these all suffer from the same issue. The average sports fan does not have access to quality sports stats to upload. With StatPlot, you don't need to bring your own data because you can use the expansive StatSheet database!"

It's not just sports fans that could use a hand with data sets. We all could. Thanks for leading the way in truly democratizing data visualization, StatSheet.

We are not quite sure how, exactly, ESPN will bring its own player to YouTube and whether this means that ESPN will continue to host its content and ads on its own servers. We asked YouTube about the details of this arrangement and will update this post once/if we get an answer.

Google has generally shied away from doing pre-roll ads on YouTube and argued that they did not perform well on the service, but given the current economic climate and the pressure on YouTube to actually make a profit at some point, it would seem that Disney and ESPN were able to convince YouTube to give pre-roll ads a try.

I discovered OleOle at a taping session for a reality tv show about startups that I'm participating in. I'm one of the judges and one of the 20 startups competing for the grand prize is OleOle. OleOle is based in both New Zealand and the US, with its software development and technology HQed in NZ and marketing and sales in Los Angeles. It has 28 employees in total. The website has been in development for 2 years and the full launch was April.

OleOle has a full complement of social media features - personalized start page, blogging, photo sharing, videos, profiles, groups, news, voting, podcasts, forums, etc. It also features more traditional soccer website fare, such as fantasy leagues, live scores, tables, stats, and more. OleOle is going after a potentially huge vertical social network market - football fans. Football (soccer) is by far the world's most popular sport, and one of the few truly global football codes. There are an estimated 1 billion fans worldwide, according to OleOle.

OleOle has big plans. It wants to be "the future of football online" and already claims to be the leading social media site for football. I had some questions about that in the tv show taping, as sites like EPSN Soccernet and Yahoo Sports are also enormously popular online soccer sites. However OleOle does differentiate itself by being a purely social media site - they pointed out for example that the content is 100% fan generated (FGC instead of UGC?). Although not all of that is amateur content, as we shall see below.

OleOle has acquired some of the leading football blogs, such as the Chelsea Blog and the aptly named ArseBlog - a fan blog for English football club Arsenal. I say aptly named, because I'm a Manchester United fan - arch rivals of Arsenal :-) The one-man ArseBlog was acquired by OleOle a month ago. I have to admit, it has an awesome byline (see image). And you can see the potential payoff for OleOle owning ArseBlog in this post, about a player Arsenal may or may not be buying, which garnered over 1,500 comments (or "arses" in the site's lingo).

OleOle's revenue model is advertising, but it also plans to get into sponsorships, merchandising and ticketing. This is one of the advantages of using social web technologies for a mainstream audience - there is a potentially big and lucrative market, and soccer brings some added revenue options (match tickets, team jerseys, etc).

Right now the company isn't cashflow positive though. It's taken NZ$6 million in series A funding so far (mostly from its founders), and is currently shopping around for a Series B. OleOle aims to hit profitability by 2010, which not coincidentally is when the next football World Cup is on. Ultimately, OleOle could become an acquisition target itself, for a mainstream media company that covers soccer such as ESPN or any of the US television networks.

Overall OleOle is an impressive site and a great example of how the Social Web can be utilized in the real world. I'll be watching OleOle with interest, not only for the tv show but as an example of what can be done with web technologies for a mainstream audience. Another thing to watch is whether they use the platform they've built for other sports.