Long-time readers of louisgray.com know that behind tech, one of my most avid passions is that of sports. Be it baseball, college football, or basketball, I'm a huge fan. I have my team loyalties and want to know all I can about my favorite teams. As part of this sports obsession, I found Web communities like SportsBlogs Nation and Ballhype to help me get the latest and best sports news from fellow fans around the world, as well as engage in community around our shared passion. As I recounted in July, the Ballhype team was acquired by Future US for $3 million, and yesterday, the SportsBlogs Nation team announced they raised a funding round in the single-digit millions of dollars, without more details being disclosed. The funding round was led by Accel Partners, the same team who helped bankroll Facebook, and by Jim Bankoff, former AOL programming chief. The funds will be used to further expand the rapidly growing sports blogs network, and help improve the platform.

Overnight, I connected with SportsBlogs Nation president Tyler Bleszinksi, who I've known through his family of sites since 2005, and consider a personal friend. Below is part of that Q&A done over e-mail:

LG: How large is SportsBlogs Nation today in terms of individual sites and users?

TB: We currently have 152 and we are growing that number weekly. We are very deliberate in our approach in that we only invite the highest quality bloggers, with established track-records, to join our network. Therefore, we will never rush to launch sites just to grow our blog numbers. We don't release any details about our registration base. I can tell you that internal numbers show that we have about 2.5MM people using the sites each month and that we're seen explosive growth across our entire network in all metric categories (in some cases doubling our metrics every six months.)

LG: What is helping to drive the growth of the network?

TB: The growth is likely driven by several factors:

1. positive macro-trends as new people discover and engage with our blogs each day
2. more engagement with our existing users as we add great new writers, features and technology - including our new blogging platform which is a huge success. Just last week for instance, we added two of the top sports bloggers on the web: Jeff Clark/Celticsblog and James Mirtle/From The Rink
3. the declining investment by newspapers and other media in local sports coverage, which makes us the go-to source, particularly for mid and smaller market teams like Oakland for instance
4. the traffic-driving network effect of intelligent cross-promotion across our network and the general sports and blogging ecosystem
5. our team/tribe focus where we enable fans to publish and discuss within specific communities built around their passion.

On that note, one important and overlooked fact is that we are the leading regional independent sports network in many areas. For instance, in the Bay Area we have the top sites (Athletics Nation, McCovey Chronicles, Golden State of Mind, Niners Nation, etc) for just about every team, add it up and we're bigger than just about any other media property focused on Bay Area sports. Same can be said for other markets like Chicago, Texas, etc.

LG: How much funding did you raise, and what will it be used for?

TB: We're not releasing the amount, but we basically went after an amount that would allow us to become the top sports social community on the Internet. We're still cheap, even more so in this economic climate, and running this company on a shoestring, only spending where there is a measurable return.

We plan on using the money to further advance our sports-centric social media and publishing platform, which is already, in my opinion, the best blogging platform ever created for sports publishers, contributors and audiences. We want to iterate on it and continue to invest in advancing an open platform for sports fan activity streams.

It will also allow us to expand our leagues much more quickly by getting more man hours working on bringing the best bloggers on board. Our aim is to truly have the best team blog for every team in every sport and we need our league managers to be spending more time working on bringing the best bloggers in.

The other thing is that it gives us a talent like Jim Bankoff on board. And Bankoff is a supremely skilled executive who is laser-focused on making SportsBlogs Nation a large and profitable business. He knows this space well considering his past experience at AOL. He's already working to bring aboard other executives who will be focusing on business partnerships and generating revenue opportunities.

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I have been an active participant on SportsBlog Nation for the better part of four years now, and have enjoyed the community at sites including Athletics Nation, Sactown Royalty and California Golden Blogs. My user ID can be found here: http://www.sbnation.com/users/louismg.

Also see:
SportsBusiness Journal: Tech Leaders Back Sports Blog Network

Social Median, an online news site and social activities aggregator powered by your peers, is launching a special election site, in partnership with the Washington Post and other content providers to help users get even more ramped up in advance of next week's presidential election. The new site, found at http://election.socialmedian.com, aggregates election news from a wide variety of news sources, as well as social tools, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, hoping to provide a single social hub for what will prove to be a big day for either Barack Obama or John McCain next week.




As Twitter has done with its own Election 2008 site, Social Median is taking what so far has been a network with rich topic diversity and helping to add focus. Social Median, as with its core service, divides the Election page into four main sections:

• Hot Discussions: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=hot-discussions
• Popular: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=popular
• Recent: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=recent
• Rising Fast: http://election.socialmedian.com/?s=rising-fast

Also new, as of Wednesday morning, is the introduction of a widget that users can post to their own blogs, taking the Election discussion with them. Already signing on to display the widget are The Washington Post and The Guardian, which will highlight user-submitted news and reports. (Get the code here)



In what's been a hotly-contested election that has seen partisan voters claim bias from both sides, and few trusting the media, why not get away from a single person choosing your news, or even a single paper? Social Median and Twitter are helping you find the election news with a little help from your friends.

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

On Wednesday, a new site is set to debut, hoping to help ensure everyone's vote gets heard on election day. Twitter Vote Report is a volunteer effort which will allow anyone at the polls report problems they may have while voting, by using tools including Twitter, text messaging, or their iPhones. The site was inspired by a TechPresident post citing the benefits of using Twitter for election day voting problems. A collection of blog posts ensued, resulting in a collaborated effort between software developers, designers, and marketers to make it easy for you to report any problems on Election day.

The concept is simple. To report how your voting experience went on election day, prefix your experience with the hashtag, #votereport. Have a serious issue? Use the following hashtags:

• #EP{two-letter state code} - e.g. EPNY for New York, EPOH for Ohio (for serious legal issues only)
  
• #machine - use this tag to signal a problem with a voting machine
• #registration - use this tag to signal problems with the registration process, people being turned away for paperwok reasons
• #wait:time - use this tag to signal a long wait. Add a colon and the wait time in minutes - e.g. #wait:30 for half an hour, #wait:120 for two hours

A team of volunteers will be monitoring all reported codes and reporting noted patterns to the appropriate channels. At the same time, going to http://twittervotereport.com on election day will enable you to see the wait times at the poll locations near you, problems users are having around the nation, and perhaps you could even help a fellow citizen with a question. According to their Wiki:

Imagine a nationwide web map with pins identifying every zip code where Americans are waiting over 30 minutes to vote or indicating those election districts where the voting machines are not working. Collectively we will inform each other when when the lines too long and ensure that media and watchdog groups know where problems exist.

Twitter Vote report is partnering with partners such as Election Protection Coalition, Rock the Vote, Credo Mobile, Common Cause, Plodt, YouTube, Twittervision, NPR’s Social Media Desk, Independence Year Foundation, The Center for Community Change, Student PIRGs, PBS, Video the Vote, Election Suppression Wiki, Women Donors Network, and Demos. In addition, Current TV will be using the #votereport information as part of their special election coverage throughout the day.

You can also update your voting situation via an iPhone app that will soon be available via the iTunes app store, by sending a text message to 66937, calling (567) 258-8683 (258-VOTE) (to leave a message), or to talk to a human you can call their partner at (866) OUR-VOTE. It's not too late if your business would also like to get involved - see their Wiki for details.

Twitter Vote Report is an incredible use of social media for the use of ensuring that everyone gets their vote out on election day. Services like Twitter give everyone a voice, and this election season that voice can actually be heard. Let's look forward to a record-setting election season as we use these tools to be sure everyone's vote is accounted for.

Hat tip to Myrna the Minx for sharing this with us!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Since its launch, AideRSS has aimed to leverage social tools to help determine a publisher's most popular content, through analysis of individual posts and their related activity, including Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, links in Google, and total comments. RSS advocates suffering from information overload have even turned to AideRSS to act as an intelligent filter, providing them the best stream, rather than the default firehose. With today's new announcements, along with a rebranding as PostRank that saw the launch of a new Web site and look, the service has added tags, keyword filtering, and other tools that will get users to the data they are seeking quickly.

(See from December 2007: AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best)


PostRank Shows Posts With Audience Engagement Have Higher Score
The first major enhancement to the new PostRank is keyword filtering. As Ilya Grigorik wrote, users have asked for the ability to customize and filter any RSS feed with specific keywords. For example, you could get all posts from The Unofficial Apple Weblog that mention iPhone, or posts from Matt Cutts that mention SEO.


I Tagged TUAW as iPhone and Filtered for Only iPhone News
You can also now tag feeds you import into PostRank, helping to build out what the team calls "custom content channels" based on those tags and keywords. All feeds tagged with BlackBerry would be in the BlackBerry channel, etc.

Most interesting to developers may be the introduction of full API access. According to Grigorik, all operations possible on the new postrank.com site are accessible by API, making it easy to utilize the filtering capabilities seen in their service on other applications.

As a blogger, the new PostRank offers better ways to see if specific posts do better with readers and the social services based on keywords. As a consumer, you can now read fewer feed items and still be sure you don't miss those that are most interesting to you. You can find PostRank at http://www.postrank.com. Of course, going to the old AideRSS.com will push you there as well...