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This is the best time of the year. Spring is in the air, and so is madness. March Madness, that is.

I’m not embarrassed to say that I am a college basketball fanatic, though many in the academy (and my family) probably think I should be more than ashamed. For hoops nuts like me, the past week of conference tournaments has been mere prologue to the main event. This is a week in which I must work conscientiously Monday to Wednesday to make up for the distractions brought by the first days of the tourney, Thursday and Friday. No matter how hard I try to be responsible, buzzer-beaters and Cinderellas will inevitably wind their way into my consciousness and push to the side any sense of duty. I’m not alone. American productivity won’t be aided by the emergence of March Madness on Demand, an online viewing tool that rescues diasporic fan-bases from the frustrations of CBS’s regional programming while threatening to undermine bottom lines everywhere. Every one of the games in the first three rounds is available for online viewing, for free. CBS advertises the service as for those “stuck in a cubicle” during daytime games, and the video player even features a “Boss Button” which you can click to immediately transform your desktop into an Excel spreadsheet. No kidding.

As irrelevant as all of this may seem to the regular goings on here at Cacophony, there is a link… there are many, many links, actually, and you can follow them to learn everything you want to know about college hoops and the tourney, and to research selections for your bracket challenges (the FBI has estimated that more than $2.5 billion changes hands in NCAA office pool betting).Fans of college basketball, like many people who invest ridiculous amounts of time in their passions, have firmly ensconced themselves in the blogosphere. College hoops bloggers range from the sabermetricians who focus on statistical analysis to the homers who obsess publicly about their teams. Many blogs offer predictions for the tourney, others aggregate the day’s hoops news and etceterata. One offers a petition that argues CBS should fire their obnoxious and analytically-underwhelming color analyst, Billy Packer. A site I read every day combines many of these approaches: Big Ten Wonk is run by an Illinois fan/American History PhD/stats-maven who offers 7-day a week blogging during tournament time under the heading “A Wonkalypse Now.” He regularly works Hegel and the Frankfurt School into his analysis. If I remember correctly, the Frankfurt School last appeared in the tournament as a 16-seed in 1989, and almost knocked off UCLA.

Beyond justifying how I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past few days (and months), this post is meant to show one example of how the blogosphere and Web 2.0 have welcomed and nurtured a cacophony of voices around a topic. In the process, they have changed how people relate to to the world of college hoops. The blogs above and the gazillion online college hoops forums have allowed passionate fans to express themselves, engage and connect with others, and learn more about the game they love. The pulse, flavor, and core issues of college basketball are accessible in a trip through these blogs. March Madness was around well-before these developments; they’ve just made it madder.