PDA's and Blogging the Kentucky Derby

Behind the glamor of hosting headliner events like the Triple Crown event Kentucky Derby or the Breeders' Cup, 130 year-old Churchill Downs faced the grim reality of a declining live gate and handle. Name recognition alone could not sustain a healthy bottom line for Churchill Downs Inc., the owner. Nonetheless, the company saw in information technology ways to enhance marketing and customer experience during race days.

Obviously the biggest hurdle was the single day in the year when 158,000 punters converge on the four tracks of Churchill Downs (CD) to bet and generally share in the excitement of the Derby. CIO Dan Farber took advantage of wireless technologies to triple ticket sale and dispensing capacity at the track without the expense and uncertainty of laying down new wired-network capacity and testing it. So when race day rolls around, any punter close to a Firewire access point in the CD complex can make and place bets via his PDA.

Recognizing at last how significantly the Internet has permeated the lives of the household population in general and racing aficionados as well, CD did what it could to leverage the RSS and blog channels for marketing: renewing awareness about CD events and encouraging the core business of betting.

Now commonly understood to mean "Really Simple Syndication", RSS is a group of formats that publicize news, advertising or even opinion pieces over the Internet. These formats include news feeds, blogs and podcasts.

Since 1999, when the first XML definition was written, RSS has gained a solid place in the spectrum of Web 2.0 services. Thus, horse racing RSS subscribers use programs called feed readers or aggregators into which they enter links for the race event news feeds they are interested in. The next time the horse racing subscriber loads the program and logs onto the Net, the reader software takes over the job of checking each horse race feed for updates and effortlessly presenting these for instant perusal.

Short for "web log", blogs are online journals that originated as online diaries but quickly expanded to include expert commentary or analysis, accept feedback posts and diversified to photoblogs (for sharing photographs), sketchblog (a gallery of sketches and thumbnails), vlogs (videos), or podcasting (for audio content). Such is the popularity of blogs that blog search engine Technorati reckoned there were already in excess of 71 million blogs by early May 2007.

For the Derby and other races run at CD, the racetrack owners thought of hiring horse racing bloggers as the Net equivalent of tipster columnists and handicapping tables in the sports pages. This business model takes its cue from the success of online stockbrokerages using the Net to send great volumes of analysis about listed corporations one way and receiving buy/sell orders from subscribers in return.

At core, therefore, a horse racing blog about the Derby could be a highly personal piece selecting from the reams of statistics about the runners in the event and using one or another handicapping system to produce tips for win, place or multi-race bets.

In essence, the horse racing blogs comprised an extra avenue for publicity and, by giving novices and hesitant bettors better-informed choice, encouraged betting. CD got various horse racing experts to give different points of view as the field of 440 horses was narrowed down, via elimination events, to the final field of 20 runners in May.

Though CD has some way to go to achieve a more respectable bottom line, the race track owner is at least off the starting gate with wireless betting enabled and generating publicity through RSS and blogs.

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