The idea behind lowpost.net, striketwo.net, and faircatch.net was triggered by personal frustration. As the 2005-06 NBA regular season began, I found that I just didn't have the time to keep up with all of the quality NBA blogs that I wanted to read. Using an RSS reader helped, but it wasn't enough. The first version of lowpost.net was originally built only for my own personal use; I decided to publish it externally after the results looked promising enough.

Here's a brief overview of how the application works:

• Every 15 minutes, it checks for updates in the XML (RSS, Atom, or RDF) feeds of tracked blogs.
• For each post, it identifies the league-related links, teams, games, players, coaches, executives, broadcasters, and other people referenced.
• Posts are compared using these references in order to identify similar groups. This is handled automatically, with no human intervention. The grouping isn't always perfect, but it generally yields interesting results.
• Blogs, players, and teams are ranked according to links and references.

Baseball fans can use this site to keep up with the latest news and discussions, discover new blogs, find different viewpoints, and track individual players and teams.

For bloggers, the site also provides topic ideas and pointers to other bloggers with similar (or opposing) points of view.

Feel free to send a quick note if you have new sources to add, comments, or suggestions.

--Jason Gurney