Monday Musings: A whole new world

Here’s a thought for you all to ponder: How did you get the bulk of your Cyclone news say, 10 years ago? (Please post about this on the forum too as I would be very curious to hear what you have to say about that.) 

Back in 2004, I was a sophomore at Iowa State working for the old Scout site, CycloneNation.com. Clearly, the Internet did exist a decade ago but today’s lifeblood was simply in its infant stages. 

Twitter wasn’t around. Message boards existed but only the hippest of the hip were on them (including this obnoxious 20-year old at the time, Jeremy Lind and prominent CF poster CycloneErik). Facebook had just been invented. Reading a newspaper online occurred but back in the good ole days (like 2004 is THAT old, right?), a handful of scribes thought that this “intereweb” thing was nothing more than a fad. In fact, I remember having a conversation with a guy (he was an annoying, old school fellow journalism student of mine) my senior year who told me that he didn’t think my aspirations of having a career strictly online were realistic (my message to him now).

This brings me to what went down on Sunday. It was during church when my cell phone started to vibrate in the pocket of my gray dress pants. This wasn’t an ordinary church service though. My pretty little niece, Kaylee, was being baptized. My wife, who puts up with more than she probably should when it comes to my addiction to all things CycloneFanatic.com, was a sponsor for the baptism. Prior to the beginning of the service while I was stuffing my face with cinnamon roles purchased for only five bucks at the church bake sale, she had given me strict instructions upon walking to the front of the church.

“Take as many pictures as possible,” this 105-pound woman who scares the living tar out of me said.

“Yes boss,” I sarcastically replied.

A few minutes later, it was go-time. The ever-so-important baptism was about to go down. When I reached into my pocket to grab my phone (to snap photos because nobody uses actual cameras anymore), I couldn’t help but see messages that Iowa State had received a hoops commitment from a 7-foot-1 center out of Greece.

Wait. What? 

Now this was certainly something that doesn’t happen every day. This is a huge story! I usually salivate at the thought of writing about a topic so juicy. 

At this point, I had a major decision to make. I needed to either follow my wife’s instructions or get my tweet on. Ultimately, I did what every wife-fearing 29-year old man would do. I took the damn pictures and got beaten like theTCUbasketball team by fellow reporters on the story. 

This brings me back to the original point of this column. It is something that we already know but the fact really slapped me across the face this weekend.

Another quick example…

I attended another nieces dance recital on Saturday. It was the longest three hours of my life (as she only danced for like 30 seconds, which left me in this giant auditorium watching hundreds of kids I don’t know dance for what seemed like an eternity). And what exactly do you think I did the whole time?

If you guessed followed the NFL Draft (welcome to Teddy Bridgewater’s world) and Players Championship via my i’Phone, you are correct!

The point? This always-connected world that we live in is not changing.

On a free site budget, we try hard to keep up with the times here at Cyclone Fanatic. That’s why starting last week, we got into the business of creating a brand new Cyclone Fanatic app that will hopefully blow your mind. It will be content based (more about our stories and less about the forums). Our forum software makes things difficult from a mobile standpoint (we will do our best). But this bad boy will feature breaking news notifications, ourpodcasts, videos and whatever else our awesome developer can come up with.

We are in the early stages so please don’t ask too many questions. Chances are, I won’t know the answer. I am excited about this area of growth for our company though.

Frankly, our last app sucked. This one will not. She should be up and running by football season too.

We have more big news regarding the site’s future (big, big, BIG news) that I will drop in the coming months so stay tuned and by all means, keep clicking!