SportsBlogs Nation, which bills itself as "a network of individual blog communities run by fans, for fans and united by a common devotion to their favorite team or sports", as well as the mother ship for both Athletics Nation and Sactown Royalty, two sites where I contribute, revamped their Web site today at www.sbnation.com, in an attempt to best highlight the massive amount of new content being generated daily from the site network's legion of bloggers, who have signed up to cover everything from the major national sports to collegiate, fantasy games, soccer, golf and boxing.Previously serving as something of an RSS feed aggregator for the network's sites, the new SBNation.com highlights featured posts, recent posts by sport, and showcases each of the network's 112 different sports blogs. That's right, 112, and growing. That's an amazing number, first of all, and if you take the time to visit a few of the sites, you'll be sure to find the quality of fanaticism of the sites' writers and their coverage to be as good as any you'll find in more traditional media.
Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, the site's co-founder, has often said that the world of blogs was best suited for the types of topics where people can take diametrically opposing positions, such as politics, sports and religion. Anybody who has ever tried to see if a Yankees fan and a Red Sox fan could reach consensus, or asked a mixed political crowd on the benefits of gay marriage can see that. The massive growth and acceleration of new sites and users for SportsBlogs Nation has proven Markos true time and again, and today's site revamp just may make SBNation.com a destination site in the way ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports are for more casual fans.
As for me, it's been a long time since I relied on ESPN for my sports news. Truth is, I can usually find all I need to know about sports from the SportsBlogs Nation network and Ballhype. The move from mass media to fan-driven media is in full swing.
A screenshot of the new site from tonight is on the left. Click it to gain a full image, or simply visit www.sbnation.com.