Update: Base hit for the om team! Ryan Nelson, the Unix Systems Group and am Director of Operations for Major League Baseball Advanced Media confirms the MLBlogs is live. “We just launched www.mlblogs.com today… it’s a partnership with SixApart (the MovableType people). Should be fun!
This has some seriously AA bloggers. Tommy Losarda is one of the big names but rest are what can be best described as “character actors” in Hollywood parlance. I find it most amazing is the people outside the technology industry are realizing the stickiness of user generated content, how cheap it is and how the community can only extend the brand. Expect more big name sports leagues to follow. Incidentally, if someone is keeping score, Cricinfo, which is story of like MLB.com of Cricket was the first sports site to latch on to blogs in a big way!
Looks like our friends at Six Apart just might be hitting one out of the ball park. Six Apart, makers of such fine products as Moveable Type, and TypePad hosted blog service might have snagged a deal with Major League Baseball. What that deal is – I haven’t got a clue. What I do know is that the domain mlblogs.com is registered to Major League Baseball Properties, and the DNS servers are pointing to SixApart.com. (I got a screen grab, just incase!)
SXA is still the 800-pound gorilla in the game, and despite all the hoopla from Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces, it is the gold standard for taking blogging to the masses. Or at least masses with a class. I am not sure what the deal is? Could MLB have guys like Derek Jeter blog? Or will it be blogs by baseball nuts like me. (Apparently…. its going to be both!) Either way, I am going to be tuning in. For SixApart, this one is going deep…. deep…. its gone! Anyway feel good about the fact that I wrote about them in Business 2.0 back in November 2003.
MoveableType and TypePad are cool but aren’t free. (TypePad has a 30-day free trial.) Blogger may not provide all the features that MT and TP provide but Blogger is free and is easy to use…and even allows publishing blogs to your own domain. The less said the better about the feature set and ease of use of Yahoo’s 360 and Microsoft’s Spaces.
it would be nice if it wasn’t just athletes blogging, or baseball fans blogging, but both parties blogging – together.
it would allow for an interesting conversation and outlook on baseball if there were two players and two fans posting on the same blog. just a thought.
glad they chose 6A though, at least they’ll be sure that whatever they do will be handled professionally.
garam, moveable type for personal blogs is still free, though.
MLBlog.com is not a blog. It looks more like baseball’s latest revenue stream — charge fans five bucks a month for the ”opportunity” to blog about their favorite team! What a pity. If I wanted to blog about my favorite team, I certainly wouldn’t pay MLB for the tablet. And I doubt I’ll bother reading any of these fans’ ravings. Blogs are about intelligent opinion and insight, and I can get that from SportsBlogs Nation (sbnation.com). Unfortunately, none of the SportsBlogs Nation guys appear to have media credentials; they’re mostly blogging from a fan’s point of view. MLB should have just told its beat writers at mlb.com to trash the newspaper style writing and posting they do and start blogging. And they should have used scoop so fans could attach their own ”diaries” to these blogs.