With the talk of how volunteer sites almost always end up, it's ironic that
one of the few athletics sites with any sort of commercial backing,
Trackwire, has suffered because Rivals Network has reportedly shut down (see
www.trackwire.com).
Rivals.net was a great idea but my impression, from the one or two visits I
paid it, was that it was not well implemented. I understand they had a
collection of sports sites run usually by volunteers, fanatics of each
respective sport, who would get paid a small sum.
Rivals probably had the content to match the major sports sites but they
didn't showcase the material properly. They ran it as a collection of
sports site rather than as one sports site fuelled by well qualified
volunteers producing content cheaply.
The front page, for instance, should have contained the main sports
headlines as a way of linking to the sites. Instead they featured
presumably the most profitable sites in its network.
