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

- Major League Soccer has collaborated with Big Lead Sports (nee Fantasy Sports Ventures) to create its Pro Soccer Picks platform. The new game presents a fantasy component watered down significantly from a previous MLS offering that reportedly didn’t find much success. (The downfall? Our guess would be the whole soccer affiliation.)

- Supporting the recently announced FSWA voting results, Rockies outfielder Carlos Gonzalez reportedly proved the winningest player in Yahoo! fantasy baseball by appearing on 53.4 percent of Yahoo!’s top 500 public-league teams. Buster Posey (the FSWA’s fantasy rookie of the year) came in second at 34.2 percent.

- Fantasy veteran Sam Hendricks has released a new book called Fantasy Baseball for Beginners. (No word yet on what subject the book covers.)

- Fantasy Healthball has been making its Internet rounds for a couple of years now. The effort that combines fantasy football with personal fitness recently got a full treatment from the San Francisco Chronicle.

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When he spoke with FSB.com upon launching the Fantasy Players Association, president Scott Atkins said the group would not set out to endorse certain fantasy sites, games or products. In that case, he should avoid lines such as this one from a recent DraftSharks.com media release.

“… President Scott Atkins calls Draftsharks.com new look ‘the best fantasy football site, bar none — and I’ve seen a bunch.’”

It’s a fairly innocuous quote, attributing Atkins with calling the redesigned Draft Sharks site the most attractive out there, and we know how press releases tend to work. The company producing it gets all the info together and seeks out someone it knows within the industry to say something nice about the subject of the release — the more credible the source the better.

Without the FPA, Atkins’ credibility would rest on his experience as a fantasy and/or status as a host on The Fantasy Sports Channel. Each is a fine credential but also not unique from a fair number of other individuals within the industry.

The fact that the release mentions Atkins’ FPA presidency (confusingly, but it’s there) speaks to it being pinned as a badge of credibility.

As stated earlier, this is a pretty minor endorsement, but what’s to keep any operator from any other site or game from reading it and thinking, “Cool, I know Scott. Maybe I can get him to put out a good word for my product.”

The same could just as easily be applied to any of the 11 other individuals on the FPA’s board. Such requests will only increase if the association can build its stature and tenure within the industry.

The point here is not to go after Atkins. FSB.com admires the goals of the FPA, and Atkins seemed to go out of his way to build its integrity in selecting his board and launching the initial site. If the FPA is to achieve its goals, however, it will have to be careful about endorsing or aligning itself — or even seeming to do so — with certain fantasy sites and companies.

In a brief segment from a show on the YES Network, Forbes national editor Michael Ozanian speaks about the growing fantasy sports market and how favorable the consumers are who make it up.

Honestly, if you follow the fantasy sports market research as we do here at FSB.com, this video probably won’t tell you anything new. When the folks near the top of the American financial food chain realize and report on the strength of our industry, though, it’s worth passing along.

The “Fantasy Sports Hit Mainstream” video below the featured clip features Rotoworld’s Gregg Rosenthal and Rick Cordella — along with Eric Fisher of the Sports Business Journal — talking about just what the title says. Rosenthal, for one, thinks that we’ve only seen the very beginning of fantasy’s integration into the mainstream and that plenty more awaits.

We reported back in September on the partnership between The Sports Network and Contec Innovations to grow international service to mobile phone users. Now, we’re seeing the largest outgrowth of that relationship.

TSN and Contec are nearing the launch of a worldwide sports information service that will cover a wide variety of sports, drawing from TSN’s already global reach, and be available on any network and any handset. The service will be available for branding by mobile service providers seeking to enhance their offerings to customers and will reportedly be mostly supported by advertising.

Greater access to sports information and statistics can only help enhance the capabilities of foreign markets to access American fantasy games and for interested American fantasy players to take part in contests overseas, such as those centered on English Premier League soccer.

“Fantasy has not really played a role in what we see as an obvious and palpably apparent direction to pursue: the world of sports brought to users on the one communicative vehicle that almost never leaves their side — the mobile phone,” TSN founder, president and CEO Mickey Charles tells FSB.com. “Fantasy is the natural outgrowth of the effort, as will be other games that we have planned but that remain unannounced currently for clearly recognizable reasons, the same that keep us in the forefront of the industry.”

Charles says the venture arrives with the “clear-cut intention of opening the marketplace to a vast audience that will be attracted to participation that they believed necessitated access to the Internet until now.”

TSN and Contec have already built a strong mobile presence in the Far East, offering content in Chinese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesian, but Charles says his company is also focusing on Europe. He points to TSN’s exclusive deal with the NHL as a valuable resource there, as the league is popular in Scandinavian countries. Eventually, the partners plan to offer content in more than 100 languages.