The Drubbing

There is no shortage of sports reference sites, but that hasn’t stopped new ones from popping up. Several new websites recently that are attempting to change the way fans interact with sports and acceess sporting information, mostly centering around athletes use of social media. First there was The Jockosphere which collects “the best” of all of the blog posts, Tweets, MySpace and Facebook comments from athlete’s sites and writes about it.

Next came Jockipedia, which is run by the same team that manages the The Jockosphere, and sets out to catalog the communication tools in use by athletes and teams such as their blog, Twitter feed, MySpace page, etc. Basically all of the sources used by The Jockosphere.

The newest one is Fanbase, which launched today, is more of a reference utility. Essentially, they’re trying to become the Wikipedia of athletics or as they call it, The web’s largest almanac of pro and college athletes, built by fans.

The wealth of information they’ve amassed so far is pretty expansive for a start-up, but still has a ton of room to grow. Their greatest challenge will no doubt be presenting all of that data in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the user, which sites like the Sports Reference family have struggled with. Surprisingly I haven’t found any player or team statistics, but that may be part of their future plans since they list STATS, LLC as a partner. Either way, you have to admire their goals:

The company’s long-term vision is to be the definitive source of information on every athlete that has ever played sports, from famous to not-so-famous, professional to amateur, and present-day to distant past.

Go big or go home I guess. I just want to know why I’m not up there yet.

From my perspective, Fanbase seems significantly easier to use. And the concept behind it appears like it’ll be exponentially more useful.