After proposing the idea of a forum to some of my friends on Twitter, Tim Daloisio suggested Ning. Ning offers the forum functionality I was looking for, but it also offers most of the features you’d find in any social network.

Hopefully this will be a place to meet other like minded bloggers and discuss things that are working or not working on your blogs. If things work out there will be a cadre of bloggers who can answer questions about what software is best, what affiliate programs work for them, how they score interviews and a host of other topics.

So if you’re a sports blogger (and if you’re reading this there’s a decent chance you are), I encourage you to visit the site and check it out.

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Last year, the Internet Baseball Writers Association was created to “raise the visibility of internet based sports writers.” About that same time myself, Brian Borawski, and Ryan Sosin began discussing the formation of a group for Detroit Tiger bloggers with similar intentions. Due to pressing time constraints the only thing we developed in 2004 was a name – Detroit Independent Baseball Scribes (DIBS).

This year we were slightly more organized. In addition to a get-together during the season, we selected year-end awards. DIBS intends to be an inclusive group and we had 12 sites participate in the voting. Once the results were counted we posted them on our respective blogs, and we also generated a press release. The release was distributed to the local media, as well as the Detroit Tigers.

Whether or not this approach is successful remains to be seen. The awards weren’t picked up by the local papers or mentioned on local sports talk radio. However, I woudn’t constitute that as failure. One of the goals of DIBS is to raise awareness, and by issuing the release we let the local media know about our sites. At this point it is up to the bloggers to produce quality content and build credibility.

As for the future of DIBS we want to promote collaboration and friendly competition amongst the group. We want to foster high quality content in our group because if one site succeeds the other sites benefit. A website is in development, and we’re exploring other methods of aggregating information.