A Blog for Baseball Fans Builds a League of Sites (Kos)

[sabra]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/technology/18kos.html?

A Blog for Baseball Fans Builds a League of Sites
By DANIEL TERDIMAN

Published: April 18, 2005



Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, right, the chief executive of SportsBlogs, in his home with Tyler Bleszinski, the company's president.

When Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, traded the team's two most popular pitchers last December, fans howled in disgust. A month later, Mr. Beane gave a lengthy interview to Athletics Nation, a Web log devoted to the team, explaining the deals. Afterward, the site's moderator, Tyler Bleszinski, polled his readers, asking if they now approved of Mr. Beane's trades. Fully 93 percent said yes.

Mr. Beane, the central figure in Michael Lewis's 2004 book "Moneyball," had given interviews to the site before. "The reason why I would opt to go do the interviews with them is that it's been a great forum to get the actual message across rather than having it filtered through someone else," Mr. Beane said. "There may be seven newspaper reporters covering one team, and they may be more interested in covering something first than covering something right."

Athletics Nation (www.athleticsnation.com) is the flagship property of SportsBlogs, a series of sports Web sites that is the brainchild of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of the left-leaning political blog Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com). Daily Kos, which Mr. Moulitsas began in 2002, has succeeded in part because the site allows readers not only to respond to postings but also to start their own interactive diaries.

After achieving enough success with Kos that he says he is able to live in costly Berkeley, Calif., entirely off its ad revenue, Mr. Moulitsas, 33, began to think about how the structure of the site could easily extend beyond politics.

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[HuckleB]

1. Great piece. Thanks for sharing.

I think Markos is lucky to have Beane as the GM of the Athletics, not just for his skill as a GM, but because he'd rather discuss with the blog than spread PR through the usual BS channels. I don't think Mariners fans would ever be so lucky with Bavasi. That's a closed door.

[BadGimp]

2. coolness

bliss out

[Moderator]

3. kick

:kick: