FANSPOT A MYSPACE FOR SPORTS ENTHUSIASTS.Byline: SUE DOYLE Staff Writer Among MySpace.com, Friendster.com and other hip Internet venues that have tapped into the social-networking scene, a new Web site has recently emerged that aims for the same connection -- through sports. FanSpot.com brings sports fanatics, sports rivals and sports enthusiasts to its site to gab and jab about teams and athletes they love and hate. Launched in late July, the site so far has about 1,800 registered users, including some from Santa Clarita Santa Clarita, city (1990 pop. 110,642), Los Angeles co., S Calif., suburb 30 mi (48 km) NW of downtown Los Angeles, on the Santa Clara River; inc. 1987. Situated in the Santa Clara valley and nearby canyons, Santa Clarita includes the former towns of Canyon Country, , who take verbal shots at one another on personal Web pages about their positions on local and national teams. ``We view it as MySpace meets a sports bar meets talk radio,'' said Elon Werner, director of communications Director of Communications is a position in the private and public sectors. The Director of Communications is responsible for managing and directing an organization's internal and external communications. for Beckett Media LP, the Texas-based sports publishing company that created the site. Registered users must be at least 18 and can blog, load their pages with pictures of online friends and also post images of rivals who root for the other teams. Dodgers fans who loathe the Giants, for example, can search for fans and foes of each team online and then post comments about them, often leading to a frenzy of exchanges among members. Once, a University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system in the American state of Tennessee. fan and a University of Alabama The University of Alabama (also known as Alabama, UA or colloquially as 'Bama) is a public coeducational university located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA. Founded in 1831, UA is the flagship campus of the University of Alabama System. fan went head to head with messages quickly growing from average-size letters to headline-size capital letters, underlined, Werner said -- the online version of a screaming match. Werner said that type of exchange is the whole idea behind the Web site. ``We created the sandbox A restricted environment in which certain functions are prohibited. For example, deleting files and modifying system information such as Registry settings and other control panel functions may be prohibited. and let people cut loose in it,'' he said. And while most people on the site aren't shy about their opinions of athletes and teams, they also have ideas about sports in general that they post in comment sections, such as criticisms of pink baseball jerseys and caps made for women that would make Babe Babe Paul Bunyan’s blue ox; straightens roads by pulling them. [Am. Lit.: Fisher, 270] See : Strength Ruth roll over in his grave. Another line of criticism takes stabs at the size of professional jerseys made for fans and argues that no jersey should ever be made bigger than the size of the player whose name is on the back. Southern California's professional teams are also gaining a fan base on the site, with more than five pages of enthusiasts for the L.A. Lakers See Lake poets . Dodgers fans trail behind with only two pages of fans. But even those fans have extended their online reach to other teams, from the Dallas Cowboys ``FanSpot creates a destination for sports fans of any sport, from anywhere in the world, to come together and build their own sports kingdom,'' said Peter Gudmundsson, Beckett Media LP president. |
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