Six Apart has partnered with Major League Baseball to create MLBlogs.com, a new service that lets baseball aficionados use TypePad to blog about their favorite team with branded templates. Also, MLB has contracted some big names in baseball to start blogging — I highly doubt they’ll keep it up with any sort of passion, but who knows.
One thing I do know is that through MLBlogs, Major League Baseball is simply pitching a service to its fans and trying to make a buck. If you love the Boston Red Sox then why should you pay a fee to Major League Baseball for the opportunity to blog about them? This entire deal reminds me of the team-branded crap you get free from Sports Illustrated if you signup for a subscription.
I think this deal turns weblogs from a publishing medium trying to gain traction within mainstream media, to a mass-produced vending machine trinket, and I don’t like that one bit. Remember those football team collectible pencils from back in the day? Yeah, this is about as cool as those were.
And I really hope that the Six Apart design team didn’t work on the actual MLBlogs.com website, cause it’s really, really awful. The logo has some ugly double bevel thing going on and the site’s background image looks like a Gaussian-blurred tire tread. Nothing like a vomit-inducing first impression to make me fall in love with the service.