Join the Phight
Attentive AIS readers--all four of you, give or take the odd relative--probably have noticed that I've been writing less about the Phillies lately. One reason for this, of course, is that I've been writing less about everything; I just haven't been around, or inspired, or sober, or something. The other, though, is that I'm contributing to (and, for now at least, managing) a new blog exclusively devoted to all things Phillies: The Good Phight.

The Good Phight is a proud new member of the SportsBlogs Nation family. SBN is a new business founded by Markos Moulitsas, the political activist and consultant best known as the proprietor of the site Daily Kos, that already includes sites for 25 of the 30 major league baseball clubs and is rapidly expanding into other sports. The sites share functionality with dKos, and offer both proprietor-driven content and a "diary" function for registered users to post their own thoughts as a sort of "blog within the blog."

I'm joined in this effort by a few fellow posters from philliesphans.com, which is, bar none, the best online Phils community I've yet seen and will always be a sort of "blogfather" to The Good Phight. My hope is that the two sites will complement each other rather than compete; I'm still planning to chime in on pp.com, in both "on-topic" and "off-topic" discussions. The differences will be in format, emphasis and content: the TGP team is probably more sabermetrically oriented than many pp.com members, and our site will focus exclusively on baseball--leaving AIS as more a place where I'll write about politics, culture, public policy and other sports.

This is very much a work in progress, and the excitement of a new project will, I'm sure, smack headlong into the frustration and confusion attendant upon any start-up. But like any community, its value ultimately will be determined by who chooses to join it. So I hope you'll do so.