- Mike Shields, Mediaweek

NEW YORK Former CBS and Yahoo Media executive David Katz is set to unveil SportsFanLive, a community Web site targeted at super-passionate sports fans. The venue attempts to blend elements of news and social networking.

According to Katz, who helped build Yahoo Sports' successful business before leaving the company in late 2006, the site has been designed for fans who care more about following their favorite teams and trashing the teams they hate, rather than general sports enthusiasts.

Users can establish profiles on the site and are specifically instructed to customize the home page to feature prominent links to the teams that matter most to them -- with individual team pages serving as the site's core. To populate these team pages with news, SportsFanLive will link to  4,000 sources, said Katz -- everything from ESPN.com to SI.com to popular blogs.

Fan commentary will receive prominent treatment and more prolific users will have the opportunity to become regular contributors if their comments are scored well by the community.

Users can perform various tasks to accumulate SportsFanLive's virtual currency, FanBucks, which can be used to wage gentleman's bets. Those bets can range from predicting the winner of specific games to predicting that a particular NBA athlete will wear an orange suit to a draft event.

Katz believes these features -- and the fact that SportsFanLive is being built as a community platform from the ground up -- will help it stand out in a crowded Web category. "There is no more passionate user that I've ever seen on the Internet [than the sports fan]," he said. "I would argue that no one has really done this kind of community platform. Among the big players, I don't see any innovation taking place. Everyone's running the same stories while adding things like fantasy sports and message boards."

Though MySpace and Facebook would seemingly be solid venues to engineer the sort of fan interaction that SportsFanLive is striving for, Katz opined that those sites are "not great for sports fans...it's hard to build subscription networks on those sites."

Executives from Samsung are buying into the idea that SportsFanLive offers the market something different. The company signed on as a sponsor to support its current Olympic-timed ad program. "We liked the concept," said Paul Golden, vp, strategic marketing, Samsung Telecommunications America. "What interests us is the way this engages the fans. It's much more of a social experience."