Earthling

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 The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.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 wrote a while back about the apparent lack of new web applications and sites geared towards baseball fans. I wanted to list out some of my recent finds in sports-related sites:

• Faircatch.net - This is a conversation tracker for Pro Football, from the people that brought you Striketwo.net. I'm using the Custom Tracker RSS feeds in my Reader to keep track of blog conversations about the Oakland Raiders. Yeah, I know, Jeff George is old.
  
• Yardbarker.com - Yardbarker is a "digg-like" sports news site, where the users submit stories and decide on their popularity. There's a great rundown of how Digg works on Valleywag. I'm a big fan of the yardbarker icon.
  
• ArmchairGM - I mentioned them in my previous round-up. They have some changes and new features coming, including new partnerships with MetsBlog and the JetsBlog. From what I can tell, their goal is to use the expertise of team-specific blog communities to add features to the wiki, and in turn provide team blogs with a well-maintained, well-visited, supported wiki platform. They tell me they have more announcements on the way.
  
• AOL's Fanhouse - This is less a web app and more a new, pretty useful NFL-related group blog done by AOL. It has blog entries in the main column and stats and scores in the right column.
  
• Fanspot - Fanspot bills itself as a "sports social network." I haven't looked at it closely yet but in general, I think social networks centered around specific interests are too limiting to be worth the effort of joining. It takes a lot of effort and energy to invest yourself in something like this, and if you have more than one interest, you'd end up having to duplicate that effort in several different places. And make friends in one that wouldn't transfer to the other.
  
• Fanlete - This is another social network about sports, but it shows some promise with its special features. You can predict the outcome of games, and compare it to the actual outcomes, and compete against others in picking winners. I'd like to see these as features of a larger, more general social network site some day, instead of a separate site.