A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

- Fantasy sports presented the best kind of social-networking before we ever started to even use that term. Tommy Landry (a “senior analyst” for RotoExperts.com) uses his Return on Now blog to explain what qualifies fantasy sports as meaningful social networking.

- Pay the Fan has partnered with the Motor Racing Network on a fantasy NASCAR competition with a $50,000 top prize. Consumers can join for free with the purchase of tickets to a qualifying Nextel Cup race.

- FantasyAgent.com — a not-yet-live site that wants participants to “sign” athletes to build best possible client portfolio — is holding an open competition for the design of its logo. About four days remain until the deadline.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

- Fantasy hockey content site SchoolYourPool.com has joined Fantasy Sports Ventures’ Fantasy Players Network.

- Fighting Chance Fantasy recently redesigned its site.

- Derrick Eckardt of FantasyEthos.com points out that the fairly favorable Web domain FantasyNASCAR.com can be had, but there are reasons to be wary if you think you want to buy it.

- This blogger thinks a fantasy art-auction league could be viable, where participants would draft artists and then score each time an artist sold a painting via auction house. Hey, who am I to judge? I played a year of fantasy XFL.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

For the second straight year, BlogTalkRadio will feature 24 hours of baseball talk for charity this weekend, put on by FantasyPros911.com and BaseballDigest.com.

Paul Greco and Lenny Melnick of Fantasy Pros 911 created the event last year and managed to raise $7,500 to fight cystic fibrosis. This year’s installment will benefit Operation Homefront, which provides aid to returning soldiers and military families.

“It’s just a privilege to be a part of something so close to my heart,” Greco, an Air Force veteran, said in the media release. “Operation Homefront is a great organization providing a great service for many of my friends and their families still in the service. It’s an opportunity for an entire industry to give back to the troops who make it possible for all of us to play a game we love.”

BTR’s Fantasy Sports Channel also teamed up with Sigmund Bloom and Cecil Lammey of Footballguys.com in August for a football edition of the talk-a-thon, which also raised money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

As part of this second baseball event, FantasyPros911.com is offering a free one-year premium subscription to anyone who donates $25 or more. In addition, $3 from every purchase of the children’s book “A Glove of Their Own” will go to the cause — as long as you enter the code OHF-526 when you buy it.

The show begins at noon on Saturday and runs until noon Sunday on The Fantasy Sports Channel.

I started to turn this announcement of a new fantasy horse-racing game into a blurb for the FSB News page, but then I realized that it’s really worth more than that.

DerbyDreamer.com, which was launched a week ago by Vinery Farms, isn’t just trying to be a quick, free game to drum up some interest in the “sport of kings” as we move toward the Triple Crown races. Its founder seems to be heading into this venture with his sights set on building the next Fantasy Fishing.

“Tom Simon came up with the idea as a way to draw more people into the industry, and it’s a passion of his, so we’re really doing it for the good of the game,” Tom Ludt, general manager of Vinery, told Bloodhorse.com (referring to a co-worker, I assume). “As you know, our business is losing more and more media and fan attention, so hopefully this is a way to draw in the younger generation and anybody that likes the fantasy games.”

The way this game will seek to draw in that expanded audience is by awarding $10,000 monthly prizes to top scorers and $120,000 to the full-season winner. It’s not the million dollars that FantasyFishing.com blew into town handing out, but six figures is a pretty big deal for winning a “fantasy stable” contest.

Also unlike the fishing example, Derby Dreamer opens as a pay-to-play contest, requiring $12 per entry. Obviously, any entry fee is going to drive away the more casual fantasy set (the majority of the market). Twelve dollars, however, is a low enough fee to entice the kind of player who will put in a little time and effort to vie for the big prize — low enough to get many such players to buy multiple entries.

That money-spending player, of course, is the valuable relative minority in the fantasy space. Among other things, “he” is attractive to potential advertisers and sponsors.

Most importantly, it appears as though the company is behind this concept and willing to give it some time to see if it’ll grow.

“We’d love to get to the point where we’re profitable and can (tie it to a charity), but we’ve got an enormous amount of money invested just to make this happen,” Ludt told Bloodhorse.com. “It will be very interesting what kind of response this gets over the next three or four months. Hopefully it catches.”

Will it? We’ll see. According to the site’s leaderboard, the game has 243 entries so far. Competition opens in the month of March.