We are a fan-based sports community built on a customized MediaWiki (Wikipedia) engine that combines blogs, news, and voting, with the power of a sports-wiki.

The site aims to put sports information, of many varieties, in the hands of the fans. The readers to the site are the contributors. They post the stories, they leave the comments, they elect which stories bubble to the top, and they write they build the sports-wiki. This could be the ultimate in sports information aggregation, but only if the users contribute.

I’m not sure how many opinion pieces will be written. It seems that if people wanted to have their own blogs, and werer savy enough to make the entries, they would already be blogging in one form or another.

What I like most about the site is the Digg like voting system. It is also the part that could be the biggest boon to traffic for existing bloggers. It may be a chance to get additional exposure, and hits, to a blog if a story gets picked up and reviewed favorably. As a blogger, I don’t know what the etiquette would be for posting one’s own stories. Like everything else on the site, it will be left up to the community. My only quibble with the section is that I think the links to the sources should be more prominent – like near the vote total by the title.

Another benefit to bloggers is that it could prove to be another source of information, or inspiration. RSS feeds are available for many sections of the site, so it is possible to subscribe to a feed from a particular team.

This is certainly an ambitious project, and it could change the way we gather sports information.
wiki, digg

I missed my chance. But if I were living in an upcoming Super Bowl host city, here’s what I’d do:

Start Early

If you’re from Miami(next year’s host) or even Phoenix (hosting XXXXII), start your Super Bowl blog now. Snap up the good domain names now and get your blog rolling. Don’t worry too much about templates or appearances. Chances are you won’t have very many visitors at this point anyways. The key is to build a nice library of content. Possible post ideas are:

• Super Bowl preparations
• Retrospectives on previous times the Super Bowl was in town
• Local attractions
• Restaurant Reviews

The Super Bowl is a rich enough subject that there should be enough historical perspectives, and current news, to sustain a blog with a couple posts a week for a full year. The point is that getting in early will help get you established with search engines and with other bloggers.

Get Involved

While it may be sufficient to just stay on the outside, why not try and get involved. Participation as a volunteer might get you access to more information early on, and provide plenty of story-fodder later in the process.

Spread the Word

So you’ve got the blog set up, and you’ve got a couple of dozen pages of content. You’ve even spent a little bit of time making it look nice and making it easy to navigate. Now get yourself some links. This is easiest if you already have an established blog (and most readers of this site already do). That’s your first inbound link. Also network with other bloggers that cover the city. Also, introduce yourself to the host committee and at the very least get included on their press release distribution list. While you’re at it try to get an interview or two with members of the host committee. If you act like a journalist, others may think of you as one. If you manage to get an interview or two, it can just led to your credibility. Not to mention it could provide good link bait.

If you do manage to get a pretty big following early on, start trying to get credentials to anything. The chances of getting NFL credentials are probably minute, but you could get lucky and get access to various parties and other events for Super Bowl week.

Monetize

Know that early on you probably won’t make much from the blog. All the work ahead of time will be for a big payoff as the game approaches. Contextual advertising should probably be part of your strategy. Traffic and high-paying, relevant ads though probably won’t peak until the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl itself.

Another option would be to find and negotiate direct links. Ticket brokers are always a good option. They usually pay well and they come to you. If you’re ambitious you could try working with the restaurants or other areas of interest in the city. As a blog focusing on a very specific topic you can give them the audience they crave, and probably a vast discount than what they’d need to pay for traditional media. Other potential targets are memorobilia and apparel.

Is it worth it?

That’s the catch. Is it worth months or work for a potentially big payout at the end? That’s hard to say. I do know that on my very low traffic personal blog, on which I have written a couple of Super Bowl related posts, the results have been encouraging. And that is just with using Adsense for the last week or so on a half dozen SBXL themed posts.