I was elated to read overnight that many former Engadget staffers had joined forces to continue their craft in a new home - teaming up with SB Nation, currently home to more than 300 sports blogs spanning professional and amateur teams around the world. The excitement came not because we need yet another technology blog network (as there are a few already), but because of their choice - partnering with a forward-looking company that has harnessed the fervor of sports fandom, giving people a voice, becoming the truest example of people-powered blogging in the world, driving addicting communities and real-world interaction around shared interests. If the same process is followed, but applied to the world of gadgetry, the results could be tremendous.

For those who don't know the history, the first blog to pioneer SB Nation was Athletics Nation, a baseball-centric blog covering the Oakland Athletics. The blog came about as Tyler Bleszinski, longtime A's fan and sufferer (as am I) couldn't find a place online to vent about the team in good times and bad. With powerhouse ESPN suffering from East Coast bias, and local papers having no way to interact with fellow fans, he was pushed by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas to start a blog - which later spread to a family of similar blogs, beginning with baseball, and later branching out to all manner of sports, from mixed martial arts to cycling, figure skating and golf. If there's a sport that has fans who want to talk about it, SB Nation has been there.

Belatedly (for me anyway), I found Athletics Nation in early 2005, and my first thought was, "where have you been all my life?". The site promised real-time gameday threads to chronicle the day's contest, opinion posts from front page writers and regular contributors alike. Later, "Blez", as was his online moniker, gained access to exclusive interviews with A's general manager Billy Beane, owner Lew Wolff, and other players. Athletics Nation (or AN) was on the map, and started to be noted for its influence among die-hard fans. Bay Area sports journalists including Susan Slusser and Mychal Urban also made appearances, talking with ANers directly.

In July of 2005, fooling around with the Mac comics application Comic Life, I made a comic featuring then-A's player, Eric Byrnes, who would be amazing one play, boneheaded the next. (See comic) This silliness led to another comic and another, to the tune of three in five days, before the A's short-circuited my plans by trading Byrnes to the Rockies. With this void, Blez asked me to make an A's comic a regular feature, and the ANtics were born - posted each Sunday through the season and occasionally in the off-season. I kept this up for a few years, before tech and kids took over the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, due to the ANtics, I gained front-page publishing access to Athletics Nation, and was eventually put in the mix for gameday threads and other weekly posts, along with other unpaid writers who filled out the week. Opinion posts (like this one from 2008) could get 10 comments from the community or hundreds. Game threads always got hundreds, for the community would writhe in pain for every popout and celebrate every run together, regardless of geography.

Where SB Nation differs from all the other major tech sites is that fans have a voice - beyond the comment streams which often become full of vitriol. SB Nation blogs feature fan posts on any related topic, and the community generally does a good job voting up the great posts and highlighting the poorly thought out ones. SB Nation prides itself on linking to third party content and not regurgitating other's articles, even if the blog's main focus is not on break news and reporting, but instead being part of the experience.

SB Nation blogs typically have a pair or more moderators who can manage user accounts, delete comments, promote fan posts to the front page, or send users email to say they are on probation. Users can recommend great comments and posts or flag them for review by a moderator. And over time, since every participant requires a user name and one's history is attached to the user name, you see a real community develop, with people who have history and a shared experience. Blez and the Athletics Nation team celebrated the community through yearly "AN Days" at the Coliseum to take in games, and helped collect money from the community for appropriate charitable causes. AN even featured an online store for shirts and other gear that bear the site's name.

Since the site's start with a single blog, run by a diehard Eric Chavez fan, the burgeoning network now features regional hubs for local teams, a dedicated baseball hub (which I highlighted Friday) and a pattern of success which requires commitment to hard work, fun and community interaction. If the track record of SB Nation is to be repeated in the world of technology, you can expect writers that are accessible, fans who have a voice, excitement about gadgets and software, and a standard look and feel that has you knowing you've reached an SB Nation site upon first visit.

If you're a longtime louisgray.com reader, this shouldn't surprise you. In 2006 I highlighted the growing network. In 2007, I highlighted the home page revamp. In October of 2008, I highlighted their mobile site work and subsequent funding round. I have been a longtime believer in the model of fan-centric publishing and it's clear that it has worked. If the SB Nation Tech team is half as successful as the sports side has been, there's no question the network will be a must-read, go-to, community.

When selling digital goods, be they PDFs, photos, art, icons or anything else where a download completes a transaction, creating an online store can seem complicated. A Google Checkout Web Element, released last year, simplified things a bit, but a new entrant, hacked up over this weekend, makes the transaction for posting and delivery as simple as a link, with no need to ever create a custom store. The solution, which is raw, but shows potential, is called Gumroad.

The project of Sahil Lavingia, who is better known for his work on iOS apps like Dayta and Color Stream, was cooked up with the aim to let friends send simple links to each other over sites like Facebook and Twitter, and recognize real revenue from the transaction. So long as the seller has an e-mail account associated with PayPal, there's hardly any setup required.


To start selling digital assets with Gumroad, you need to set up a user name and password, and then you can post links to your digital goods, assigning prices, title and description. Once you share the link, users can buy the goods, and the money, minus a cut that isn't yet finalized, will be deposited to your PayPal account.

I tested the service this morning, posting links for a set of PDF'd comics I made of Oakland A's players from 2005 to 2008, and also the FTC disclosure icons Jeannine Schaeffer made at the end of 2009 for bloggers with conflicts. Try both links - they lead to Gumroad, and if you want the full set, it could cost anywhere between 2 and 3 bucks. It's very easy.


If there are questions about this service's usability, they become like those on other payment systems. If I get the eventual URL for the digital asset, why not pass it around for free? Why not upload that asset to a peer to peer (P2P) service? And why should I trust this service with my credit card data and secret code? They may use HTTPS, but the service could do more to make me comfortable to do transactions. It's also not clear how fast money gets deposited to PayPal.


All those caveats aside, it's an interesting experiment by a known developer who is trying to think of new ways for us to do transactions with one another simply, much like eBay, PayPal and Square have. Check it out at http://www.gumroad.com.

In our home (and blog) we don't celebrate April Fool's Day. But we do celebrate the opening of the baseball season. While for some teams, the season actually started yesterday, true opening day for major league baseball hasn't begun until today - as that's when the A's take the field. Kicking off the baseball season this year, there are some great advances in the world of baseball that every baseball fan should know to start the 2011 season off right, including a new site in the amazing Sports Blogs Nation franchise, a new baseball game for iOS and Android, and the extension of one month's MLB.TV to all MLB At Bat purchasers on all platforms.

In the tradition of baseball's 1-2-3 strikes, here are the three big stories.

1) Baseball Nation from Sports Blogs Nation

Sports Blogs Nation has been the true fans' sports network for almost 8 years, starting with my favorite, Athletics Nation, and first slowly, then rapidly, taking over the world with dedicated blogs for all major sports teams, most colleges and many specific sports globally. The fast-growing network is practically going pro this year, with the higher of former ESPNer Rob Neyer, one of the most respected baseball authors and stat geeks you'll ever see. He is now running a brand new baseball entry page to SB Nation, which pops up the league's top news, runs near-live scores, columns, and deep integration into the dedicated team sites. Every baseball fan has to check this out: http://mlb.sbnation.com/

Sports Blogs Nation's success has me somewhat wistful I didn't double down on my early work with Athletics Nation in 2005 and Sactown Royalty from 2006 on, but I traded in my athletic gear for a slide rule and glasses with tape in going geek. Tyler Bleszinski, Jim Bankoff and team have done an amazing job with the franchise.


2) Free MLB.TV for the month of April from MLB

I've purchased MLB At Bat 11 on both my Android and iOS products. It's the best way to follow games around the country. MLB.com sent me a note today that customers will get access to streaming live video from any game through the month of April. They're hoping they'll get you hooked and you just might.

3) 9 Innings Pro Baseball Hits Android for Free

Com2uS has long made the best baseball games for mobile devices. In early 2010, I told you how 9 innings on iOS kept me from missing real baseball too much after a long and cold off-season. The company's Home Run Battle 3D game is amazing on both iOS and Android, looking fantastic on my Samsung Galaxy Tab, wasting countless hours for me swinging at off-speed pitches. The new 9 Innings Pro baseball game for android comes to Android for the first time, and is free, using the newly released in-app building to help you follow your favorite teams during the baseball season. The game is made in association with the Major League Baseball Player's Association. It also works on iOS.

So there you go. In a few hours, my favorite team takes the field. But before that, I am going to read Baseball Nation to see what's new, maybe catch an out of region game on MLB TV and play a little 9 innings. It's in the name of the real holiday - Opening Day.

Following in the footsteps of Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other social networks, Quora updated its new follower notifications overnight to now include user avatars, the number of topics the users are following, and the topics themselves. Combined with the service's new approach of aggregating daily follows and posting them in a single email at 2 am Pacific time, one can quickly get a summary of user activity on the network and click to view new follower profiles.

There are other small changes to the follower notifications email. Instead of being labeled as "XX New People Are Following You", the connections are posted as "XX More People Are Following You", which probably is more accurate as it's not guaranteed that new followers are new to the system. Also, links to user profiles are not represented by machine-generated profile URLs containing random alphanumeric strings, but the more human-friendly "Click here to view User Name's profile".


Minor changes to be sure, but much more useful than names disassociated with their photos and interests. It also could serve to help avoid people aiming to drive up their follower numbers through odd user behavior. It's possible Quora will start to show follower/following data and mutual connections as Twitter and others have done to deliver more social signals in the future. To show up in my email tomorrow, you can follow me here: http://www.quora.com/Louis-Gray