[Jonathan Norris]

Wow... that was a blast! By far the most fun I've had at a regional (and i've been to a few), congrats to 1114, 2056, and 1680 again. Thanks to Paul, Karthik, Kate, Michelle, Jay, Pat, JVN, 1114 crew, ect. If you don't know I ran the webcast this weekend, and well I think the webcast by friday afternoon turned into a spectacle to see.

All weekend I was situated next to Paul Copioli who was doing the announcing, and Thanks to SOAP gameday and Ustream.tv chat we were able to communicate directly with the folks at home watching the webcast. It started off with Paul talking over the mic to people on the webcast, and turned into the announcer game where people in the chat would suggest words for paul to fit in while he was announcing the game, and suggest themes for Karthik to use in his intros. And let me say it kinda got ridiculous... I think Paul did close to 20 words in one match.

Even though some people in the stands probably didn't know what was going on half the time when Paul was using words like "Purpleicious", it really showed me the power of having an 'interactive' regional. It got to the point on Saturday where in many matches there were probably far more people watching the webcast then people in the stands! (i think our record was 380-390 people). The interactivity of Paul and Karthik talking directly to the people in the chat and using their suggestions made the repetitive task of announcing and introducing teams for 70 matches far more interesting and a lot more fun. I think the situation at Waterloo was very unique to let this happen, hopefully other MC/announcer combinations can take something from this and we can see more 'interactive' regionals in the future.

p.s. the 'meow' match was by far one of the funniest things I have seen at a FIRST event

p.s.s. Ustream was a great platform for this type of interactive regional, I personally was surprised that the stream was still working when we had 390 people on it (thats a boat load of bandwidth for a free website). and I know when we do this again next year the service will be even better.