Hello from North of the Border!

I am in beautiful Toronto for the Blogs With Balls media conference where I will be speaking about measurement and analytics in sports reporting tomorrow.

You can watch it live here: Saturday 12:30-1:30 Moneyballs: Measurement & Analytics in Sports Media.

I'm excited about it and if I get the OK I might embed the stream here tomorrow.

Anyway, because I am off in the Frozen North (not Tundra though) this will be an abbreviated column (and of course, late).

We'll be back with underrated and overrated next week when I'm not coming off four hours of sleep because my plane was delayed in Newark and I wandered into my hotel at 1am.

I can tell you that Tim Hortons is pretty tasty.

The interesting thing about being in Canada these couple of days is that, with the NHL lockout, it brings you back to last year's NFL lockout. That topic came up in the NFL panel, as George Atallah of the NFLPA was there and of course if you have one labor leader on a panel in Canada, hockey labor issues will come up.

It's interesting to hear Atallah have to answer some of the exact same questions a year later, because people are still asking about the deal they got and whether it was any good or not.

He days he has to do less reaching out to people about incorrect reports than he did last year, but it still crops up.

They also talked (of course) about the referee lockout and how that affected the safety of the players in the game.

And of course how nobody thought that call against the Packers was correct.

The other big topic that came up was social media and twitter, which made me think about this fine CHTV piece by Jayme Joers.

Tiki Barber was also on the panel and he said it is hard for players to balance that all access their fans want (as well as being able to reach fans unfiltered to get their personality, message and brands across) and deal with the (as panelist Will Brinson of CBS Sports put it) hateful internet.

We forget how human and flawed these guys are until they say something dumb or angry. Yet Twitter lets us connect to them in a human way to begin with, to get to 'know' them in a way which we wouldn't otherwise (and until a few years ago, couldn't hope to).

It was an interesting panel which you can check out here.

Well, that's it for now from the frozen tundra of Toronto. I will now go out to hunt some moose and then try to run gin across the border before the mounties get me.

Eh?