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It's the question of the NCAA tournament. Everywhere you turn, people are chanting "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" and nobody really knows what it means. We asked people all weekend, and we got as many answers as people we asked. Some talked about the bounty of limestone in Kansas, others about choo-choo trains and still others about mythical birds. Some even went zen on us . . . one person's response: "It's everything." Another's: "What isn't it?" After Monday night's impressive performance (yes, I know, I was wrong) the answer is easy: It means "winner."

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The Riverwalk might as well be called The Mississippi Riverwalk, because Memphis owns this town this weekend. Despite a thoroughly impressive win over North Carolina, Kansas could bring Phog Allen back from the grave -- hell, they could bring James Naismith back and throw in Roy Williams to boot -- and they won't beat the (formerly known as Memphis State) Tigers. They are that good.

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Underneath the city of San Antonio, Texas, right next to The Alamo is the Riverwalk, the bastion of faux-Mexican restaurants and shopping that is serving as the thrumming hub of this year's Final Four. The restaurants are jammed, the waiting time is legendary, cabs are impossible, and walking is an exercise in frustration, unless perhaps you are Derrick Rose and you can prance magically along the water.

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UCLA vs. Memphis, Kansas vs. N. Carolina ... It will be the first time ever that a major U.S. sporting event has been shown live and in its entirety on the Internet.

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Every year since 2000 I have gone to the Final Four. If you like college basketball, you must somehow find a way because it is an experience you cannot miss. I have been fortunate enough to watch my alma mater play in two Final Fours and win a national championship. I've watched Duke fans cry until blue paint streamed down their cheeks. Those are just some of the pleasures of March Happiness.

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I will normally turn down the sound on a game involving the vocal assault rifle of Dick Vitale. It's just my taste, which doesn't tend toward an unnatural love affair with Mike Krzyzewski or the barracks sadist Bobby Knight ("Robert Montgomery Knight"). But I appreciate what Vitale brings to college basketball.

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When North Carolina won the national championship over Georgetown in 1982, Michael Jordan was the precocious teenager alongside tournament MVP James Worthy. His game winning shot that night was his introduction into our collective consciousness. But thanks to modern technology, there are very few surprises now when it comes to college stars.

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The top-seeded Lady Terrapins edged out Nebraska 76-64 on Tuesday, but the real backstory in Maryland is that one of its county networks held stable in the face of a record number of unique visitors to the March Madness site.

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It's Easter Sunday, so it's fitting that I ask forgiveness for my serious addiction to basketball, an affliction that I don't suffer alone but one that has me concocting work-related reasons to watch basketball, pursuing every possible technology angle behind the games and ignoring every single priority in my life. They don't call it March Madness for nothin'.

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Damn these brackets. Let me tell you how bad it is. After round one, my colleague Mitch Wagner was ahead of me. This is a guy we had to explain the tournament to; a guy who sent out an e-mail about our Hoop Madness site with the subject line "NBA Tournament."

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Kansas State wasn't the only team to advance on the NCAA tourney courts Thursday. CBSSports.com managed to rake up some of its own points on the first full day of March Madness, proving that fans want more game and fewer hoops to jump through.

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An onslaught of content is traveling through your servers right now. Do you block it? Do you pass? Perhaps you can score. Anyway your employees play, it's the customers who'll demand that you get'cha head in the game.

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Today, CBSSports.com issued an additional 250,000 VIP passes for its exclusive March Madness on Demand (MMOD), a service that lets you watch every single game of the NCAA basketball tournament online, regardless of local blackouts. A VIP pass gives you priority access over others. The final VIP passes in the initial 500,000 allotment were claimed via registration earlier today and, given what CBS Sports officials say is typical, the highest demand for access will take place the morning of the first games while worker productivity, at least for those companies not specifically blocking access, drops faster than a brokerage house market cap.

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Bracketology is clearly an obsession. I've written so far about two different applications written to help people fill out their March Madness brackets. (I know I keep saying this, but don't forget to join the InformationWeek bracket). This is about a third program, this one built by the Spotfire team at Tibco. Spotfire is an enterprise analytics platform that specializes in interactive visualization.

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Need some guidance in filling out your brackets for the NCAA men's college basketball tournament? Here are a few off-the-cuff tips, based on lessons learned from 20 years of tournament pool experience. Warning: While I've managed to win a few pools in my day, I've also flamed out early with a high-risk strategy. One year I correctly picked all four teams in the Final Four -- only to finish second. For a chance to win a 42-inch plasma TV, fill out the InformationWeek Hoops Challenge brackets by going to CBS Sportsline here, and then signing up for the InformationWeek Bracket here using the password biztech.

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Having trouble with your brackets? I've got your answer. Thanks to Coke Zero and the folks at Crispin Porter and Bogusky, a boutique creative design shop, you've now got Bracket-O-Matic. Just use the nifty sliders to select the values you think are important and voilà, you've got your bracket. But don't stop there. You can put that bracket right into the CBS Sports.com bracket (including the one you belong to with InformationWeek; password is biztech).

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Last night, watching all of the experts reach the same, boring conclusions (only Bobby Knight colored outside of the bracket lines picking Pittsburgh to win it all) it became clear that only by sheer luck or insanity could you pick a Marquette or a George Mason (or Pitt) to get to the Final Four. There are so many factors to consider, but it always comes back to the number one seeds. But we live in an Information Age, so why not use technology. And that's just what two professors have done to create Dance Card (to predict at-large tournament berths) and Score Card (to predict the tournament winners).

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We already have some clues about this year's Cinderella, the team that somehow every year spoils all the fun (see also: make mad in march; anger) for top seeds but actually makes it that much more interesting for viewers. Mostly they come from mid-major (a term that smacks of "not quite good enough") conferences, and most of those conferences have finished their yearly tournaments by now; the winners get automatic births (ah, to be born).

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One day after the official launch of Hulu's Internet TV service, Thursday's New York Times warned of a bandwidth crunch on the Internet in the not-too-distant future. Video traffic on YouTube alone, data showed, was as much as all Internet traffic in 2000. Next week begins CBS Sports.com's March Madness On Demand, and for now neither CBS Sports, nor its key partner, Akamai, are worried.

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There is absolutely nothing like March Madness to kick off the spring. Bubbles and brackets, vasectomies (I'll come back to that), 9:00 a.m.-until-God-only-knows-when because I've fallen into such a stupor that I start hearing Jim Nantz's voice in my dreams. Did I mention you don't need to miss a game? Oh, CBSsports.com. All the games. Online. Live. On Demand. Need I say more?

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