By no means do I want to be a doomsday prophet. In fact, unless I’m getting paid for it, I hate making predictions. I mainly hate to because I hate being wrong, which, it’s been my experience that if you make enough predictions, odds are you’ll be wrong a few times more that you’re right.

How many of you braced for the end of the world — or at worst the end of the digital age as we know it — leading up to Dec. 31, 1999? Oh, those Y2K predictions. They had us on the ropes for sure. MORE

Undeniably, the Internet has changed our sport. Mostly, I’d say, for the good. Obviously, this very website — and its many subscribers — is a benefactor of the new media. That’s what we used to call it at the newspaper where I worked. New media. It’s hardly new anymore.

I first started updating a website in 1999 when I was a sports writer at the News-Tribune in La Salle, Ill. It was pretty basic stuff. Copy and paste, add a photo, write a cutline. Simple. The software we used was MORE