Posted on April 7, 2006 at 12:58 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
I've had my eye out lately for sites that bring the latest web application technologies to baseball fans specifically. I'm sure I'm missing some, but there aren't as many as you'd think there would be, and I wonder why that is. You'd think that a group of people interested in deep statistical analysis, information sharing, searching, and customization would be perfect for the current crop of emerging web technologies.
Gabe Rivera's new Ballbug.com is strangely one of the pioneering sites in the field. So far I've enjoyed using Ballbug.com, but I don't like that most of the conversation right now centers around mainstream media articles. I'd like to see some of the discussions organized around some smaller fish.
Because he's one of the first well-known entities to try to serve baseball fans in this way, he shoulders the burden of hearing criticisms (like mine) that may fall outside of his goals. But here goes anyway: The biggest challenge I want to raise with Gabe is that many of the best (and worst) conversations among baseball nerds take place in independent message boards and not blogs. I'm by no means qualified to talk sabermetrics, but I do enjoy reading home-grown statistical analyses and verbal donnybrooks like you see on Red Sox board SonsOfSamHorn. Keeping in mind that a message board based around a team will be full of both Homers and Naysayers, it's still a fun and informative place to learn about baseball. The form factor of message boards is just a natural fit for baseball debates. How do we hook a memeorandum-style conversation tracker up with message board exchanges? Or is that the wrong question to be asking?
I don't know who pointed this out first, but I feel like I've heard it a lot lately. Wasn't Peter Gammons' Diamond Notes column a proto-blog of sorts?
Read on for a list of some of the other interesting "Baseball 2.0 Sites" I've found out there. Add a comment to include anything I've missed.
- Armchair GM - This is a great Wiki about all things baseball. And I like the front door a lot. It's kind of a built-in conversation tracker, and it managers to suggest some entry points without the ugly competitiveness you get on sites like Digg.com.
- BaseballDigestDaily.com - The stat tracking is pretty sophisticated here, but it all seems to be particularly geared towards Fantasy Baseball tracking. I find the interface clumsy as well, and the front door is wasted on branding.
- BaseballThinkFactory.org - I like lots of the content ideas here, like the team-specific blogs, the community blog, and the level of discussion.
- PubSub Baseball - I actually just discovered this one as I sat down to write this article. It lets you add teams and player names to the stuff you track on PubSub.com. It's an interesting interface, where you pick the team, and then you can choose the player either by their position on the diamond, or by their name.
- Baseball For Thought - Just a good baseball blog.
- Scout.com - Meh. Has the stink of officialness and big media on it. Although it tries to feel location-appropriate and bloggy in places, it feels more like a behemoth.
- Diamond Notes Generator - Not actually a web 2.0 site about baseball, but a site that generates Gammo-speak on demand. Heh.
- (Update) StrikeTwo.net - Just found this one. Seems to be a newsfilter tracking a whole mess of blogs.
MLB Widgets - Thanks, Josh, for pointing me in the direction of these desktop widgets for Mac OS 10.4.
Comments
armchairgm rules.
Posted by anon | April 7, 2006 10:55 PM