I’m always wondering why more companies don’t help bloggers do their thing. It’s in their best interests, after all, because more people talking about your content or products and more people using your services ends up being good business. Of course, I work at such a company and I can actually address this issue directly, if only for one vertical.

So, today marks the first release of a prototype tool for bloggers who blog about sports. This isn’t a finished product yet, and I’m hesitant to get it out because it’s not polished, but you know what? I want the feedback. So, if you’re a blogger, here’s what I have. Give it a try and let me know what you think. If there’s interest, we’ll get a finished product built and

Basically, I have a small app which will pump out scoring alerts for different sports. So far, I have NBA and NFL ready to go. For each app, there are programmed notifications for key events. In the NBA version, I’m just using clock time. Alerts will be queued for games that cross 12 minute, 8 minutes, 4 minute, and end of quarter boundaries. I’ll be improving the logic as I refine the application. The NFL version will queue alerts every time a quarter starts or ends, plus on any scoring event.

Here’s a demo for what they will look like:

The video is fuzzy because of the encoding (it actually looked worse on YouTube). It also is quite small compared to the web page. It looks huge on the video because I had to make the window small to fit it in the Google Video size limits. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on my monitor:

ESPN Alerts Screen Shot

If you are interested in trying it out, all you need to do is add this script tag to your blog, anywhere on the page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://scache.espn.go.com/ESPNAlerts/ESPNAlerts.js?sport=NBA" id="ESPNAlertsScriptTag"></script>

This is a prototype tool and as such may stop working, may break your layout, or may just generally be problematic. I hope not, though. Let me know if you find any bugs. Oh, and even the ID attribute above is important. Please leave the entire tag intact when you add it to your blog or site.

I haven’t tested the NFL one, but will be tomorrow during games. Feel free to change NBA above to NFL tomorrow to see it work. It won’t do anything tonight, since there are no games and also because I’m not running the process to generate the updates.

Currently, you can only have one or the other on your page at a time. This is just a limitation for the prototype. You will be able to choose more configurable alerts in the final product, assuming there’s enough interest to build one. Of course, let me know what features you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do.

If you aren’t interested in this product, that’s OK. Let me know what tools you’d like to see. I have several I’ve built for use here on FatMixx that I’m cleaning up for release. These include plugins for WordPress to make the task of writing about sports easier. They’re basically versions of the tools we offer our own editors and writers, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have them, too.

(P.S. I feel like I should say that this isn’t the finest app ever built and unlike many things that ESPN does, it doesn’t quite have that flair and polish. It will, but I want to get this conversation started. As they say, release early, release often. I want to make sure we can get feedback before we build something perfect for us, but useless for you.)