The following is long – surprise, surprise. But it’s also the initial prototyping in my mind for a paper due in Kathy Gill’s class this quarter. So if you’re wondering why in the world I would spend anywhere near this kind of time writing on FTM, first of all, shame on you for thinking such a thing! Actually I hear ya. I wouldn’t usually. But it’s going to pay dividends down the road so pardon it’s length and if you’re brave enough to traverse your way to the end, I’d be impressed. -MB

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Many of you probably know that I do quite a bit of blogging in my ‘spare’ time. I use that term for two reasons. For starters, it’s just one of the several jobs I have as well as school. Secondly and more importantly, it’s no longer just about writing about football. It has morphed into a vast community with dozens and dozens of men and women from all over the country and world that I consider friends. So in that sense, doing ‘work’ on the blog is really like taking time out to socialize with a different group of my acquaintances and friends. There’s nothing at all special or unusual about that these days, particularly for excessively loquacious people like myself who lives at home, has no tv, and is still in corporate indentured inservitude to Verizon for 9 more months before I can get a phone Gphone or iPhone. Woe is me.

Anyway, It began as a hobby, now is part of my social life, but it has never been a job.

Plus, being in an urban environment like Seattle (famous for it’s dearth of sports success) around such hot knobs of technology, pop culture, art, new media and the rest, I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m some jock only interested in football.

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What can you do for the MCDM now? Easy. Simply suggest ways to augment what the MCDM can do for you! Selfless, yet wonderfully self-serving at the same time, no? Maybe I should have gone to law school after all…

Anyway, I got a chance to mention this in class, so perhaps some of the introductory stuff that follows isn’t necessary. But I spent a silly amount of time thinking then writing about the best way to maybe make this worthwhile last night, so I’ll leave it largely untouched if only to make me feel better about my time management skills efforts.  - MB-

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SportsBlogNation, the largest network of sports blogs in the world that I write for, recently procured a mid seven figure influx of capital from quite an impressive list of institutional and individual investors. The funding was led by:

Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley private equity firm best known for its backing of Facebook and led in part by Boston Celtics minority owner Jim Breyer. Additional funding came from Allen & Co.; AOL vice chairman emeritus and Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis; Brent Jones, former San Francisco 49ers player and now managing director of private equity firm Northgate Capital; former Yahoo! senior executives Dan Rosensweig and Jeff Weiner; and several executives from Providence Equity Partners, the venture capital shop where Bankoff remains a senior adviser.

It has been quite a process to figure out how to compensate over two hundred individual bloggers from across the country, and it has been interesting to see which metrics they have taken into consideration in addition to simply page visits. Comments from community members also have been weighted quite heavily, as well as tenure, understandably. With a legitimate management and business team in place working behind the scenes, it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, will be made to how much freedom us individuals have with our content. As of now, it’s essentially 100% hands off freedom, but as we all know, money has the power to change things quickly.

In my first entry here on Flip The Media, I thought I’d share some thoughts I’ve had about automatically refreshing comments within a blog. I write a fan-site/blog about the Pittsburgh Steelers for Sports Blog Nation, the world’s largest independent network of sports blogs. The network was started by Markos Moulitas, whom you may or may not know from his pioneering political blog Daily Kos. Suffice it to say, when I was recruited to join the network, I immediately signed on, eager to be a part of any brave new journey Markos was leading into the vast wildnerness that is the new digital media landscape.

Kos Media, including Sports Blog Nation and all its individual sites, originally was powered by a blogging platform called Scoop, a collaborative media application. Unlike WordPress or Blogger, Scoop facilitated community participation intuitively. The main feature in Scoop that was highlighted on our sites network wide that did so was the ‘diaries’ (now called ‘fan posts’ to better reflect the ‘sports’ ethos of our blogs) function, which allowed readers of the sites to post their own thoughts about whatever subject they chose. The site’s readership could then comment and respond to that ‘diary’ just like they might with a front-page post by the site’s primary author. It gave readers a sense of ownership in the site, and encouraged them to be activtely engaged in the respective site’s niche topic. For sports blogs written by mere passive fans like myself, without a press credential of course, this additional member-generated content was huge. It provided me and my readership with extra thoughts/opinions, links to relevant stories, etc. Because I wrote, edited, and managed the site in my free time, any extra help was more than welcomed. Read more…