A few weeks ago Sports Illustrated published an expansive feature article (subscription required) about how citizen sportswriters are changing sports journalistm. Obsessive and often posting about events in real time, these sports bloggers are spreading rumors, arguing and just generally feeding their sports addictions 365/24/7. Sometimes they even break stories. By the time a traditional sports columnist publishes their take on a game/issue in the local paper, these guys have changed topics three or four times. The real time nature of sports blogs make traditional sports pages obsolete to truly obsessed sports fans.

So it should come as no surprise that Memeorandum has launched a baseball meme tracker called Ballbug just in time for baseball’s opening day. Ballbug hopes to be the real time newspaper for the most passionate (and computer literate) baseball fans – tracking which stories and blog posts are being talked about the most in the baseball blogosphere.

It should also not come as a surprise that a competing baseball site called striketwo.net beat Memeorandum to market a few weeks ago or that there is a basketball meme tracker called lowpost.net.
There is little doubt in my mind that by the end of the year we will see meme tracking sites devoted to just about every vertical you can imagine – football, finance, health care. It’s just a matter of who enters which vertical first at this point.

I first read about Ballbug on Techcrunch.

Update: I took a closer look at Ballbug and Striketwo.net and Striketwo.net has a big advantage in that it allows you to track entries specifically on the team and players you follow.  Politics and sports are always local.  Here’s a screen capture of the Striketwo.net team tag cloud.