Originally born as FSDashboard, Screaming Sports just recently went offline as it appears that the site is officially dead. The site was derelict for most of 2009 as the owners looked for a way to keep it alive. But it appears that Screaming Sports and FSDashboard are both completely gone now as the pages do not load, and Google's cache copies cannot bring up any files hosted on Screaming Sports' server. Screaming Sports burnt through $1.25M in funding that it received in July of 2007. While it attempted to market itself as fantasy sports social network, ... Read More

I am going to go off on a personal note right now. In 2007, my fiancée ran the New York City Marathon in support of her Uncle Rick's recovery in his battle with cancer. Unfortunately, he lost his fight the following year. In his final month, he was supported by the Hosparus of Louisville. This weekend, she and I will be running in the Kentucky Derby Festival in a fundraising effort for the Hosparus of Louisville. I will battle 26.2 in the Derby Festival Marathon to raise as many funds as I can for these two ... Read More

ESPN's 30 for 30 series is set to premier its "Silly Little Game" feature, which is a documentary about the rise of fantasy sports and the original fantasy baseball league, The Rotisserrie League. ESPN's summary is very fair description: Fantasy Sports is estimated to be a $4 billion dollar industry that boasts over 30 million participants and a league for almost every sport imaginable. But for all this success, the story of the game’s inception is little known. The modern fantasy leagues can be traced back to a group of writers and academics who met at ... Read More

Twitter originally started as a side project of podcasting company Odeo. Post-It Notes were accidently invented while the inventor was playing around with a new glue. Sometimes, businesses end up with a product that is much more interesting than what the company originally set out to create. FanDuel was created as an application of the HubDub engine, and it appears that the founders have decided that the road to the promised land is with FanDuel and not HubDub. HubDub announced that the site will cease to exist as it founders have decided to focus on ... Read More

Pickemfirst is a browser plugin that allows you to instantly know if a player mentioned in an article is available in any of your fantasy leagues. A simple color-coded icon will display next to that player's name indicating that player's availability. Mouse over that icon and you find out which league plus player news. Currently, Pickemfirst can check on a player's availability on Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS Sports, My Fantasy League, and a perhaps a few others. In other words, Pickemfirst is scouting out players for you even when you are not thinking about fantasy sports. I ... Read More

Sometime in the last day (or potentially longer), Fantasy Players went offline and redirected its traffic to KFFL. Fantasy Players is supposed to be the flagship site for Fantasy Sports Ventures (FSV) and its advertising network of affiliates (See disclosure below). KFFL was one of the first sites purchased by Fantasy Sports Ventures, and it appears to be the future of Fantasy Sports Ventures. Update, 20 April 2010: It now appears that visitors to FantasyPlayers.com are now directed to Fantasy Sports Ventures homepage, which is probably more appropriate. However, the old Fantasy Players interior pages ... Read More

Maintaining a fantasy baseball team throughout a season is a very laborious task, which is one of the reasons fantasy football has become a much more popular sport (since its so much simpler). With its new game, BlitzPick Baseball is trying to make playing fantasy baseball with your friends just a little bit easier. Each week, a new challenge is issued to league members, where they select one of five players at each position to be on their team. One more important thing, BlitzPick Baseball is played completely within Facebook. League commissioners have the option of ... Read More

It seems like I have spent a good chunk of the spring reporting on yet another new feature within Yahoo!'s fantasy baseball product, but that's for good reason--there have been a number of new improvements, including this latest one. As part of its relationship with MLB.com, Yahoo! is the official fantasy baseball game of MLB and also has access to the countless hours of video that MLB owns. For just $9.95 for the season, fantasy players can see daily video clips of their fantasy players' key plays and at-bats throughout the season. Through April 18, ... Read More

RotoExperts is looking to bring personalized content each and every fantasy football league with a new service it calls the Fantasy Grinder. The Fantasy Grinder will bring personalized game write-ups to fantasy football leagues. Designed to immerse fantasy players in a much more realistic experience, it promises to offer a personal experience unlike any other in fantasy sports. According to Scott Engel of RotoExperts: "The Fantasy Grinder, initially designed for football, produces newspaper-style results for every fantasy football matchup in every league, in every week. All results and reports are customized to feature unique results and writeups ... Read More

Last month, I boldly wrote that Fantasy Ethos would churn put 65 posts in the month of March. Like most people's March Madness bracket, that plan went terribly astray. But, by no means, do I consider it a failure. Fantasy Ethos published a total of 36 articles in March, which is still nothing to laugh at, as it was 100% increase in production over the previous three months. In addition, traffic was up 90% compared to the previous month, and a 12% improvement over the previous three months. The biggest difference in terms of traffic was ... Read More