Deadspin

Deadspin is the most popular sports blog on the Internet. As its tag line states, the site provides "sports news without access, favor, or discretion." The site's editors post legitimate sports news, like today's inevitable Brett-Favre-Ending-Retirement-Again story, but they add their own commentary and humor to their posts. The other attribute that delineates Deadspin and other sports blogs from mainstream sports news websites is its user-driven commenting community. The commenters are just as funny (and just as driven) as Deadspin's award-winning editors, so the comment threads that develop after each Deadspin post are long and hilarious.

A confession: I was a fairly popular commenter on Deadspin (and on its sister site, the much more immature Kissing Suzy Kolber) before the demands of school took over my life. I actually had to remove both sites from my RSS reader because even their headlines are distractingly hilarious.

ESPN

ESPN.com is famous sports network's Internet presence. The site has undergone changes over the years--the most recent of which drastically changed the the entire purpose of the site. Previously, the site placed a lot of emphasis on text-links to stories and on photographs. A small video player in the sidebar would automatically begin to play (with, of course, annoying audio) when the homepage loaded, but the user needed to scroll down to the middle of the page to view it. The recent overhaul eliminated that famously-annoying feature and changed the emphasis of the homepage, moving from a text- and photo-centric site to a site that features video highlights and video stories alongside text and photos.

This change is indicative of both the increasing market penetration of broadband Internet connections and the fact that sports are best consumed by watching them, not by reading about them or looking at photographs.