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.

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A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Anyone who’s not ready for fantasy football season to come to a close just yet can start a playoff league on MyFantasyLeague.com for free.

– The Fantasy Man wants his new site, FantasyPlayersExpress.com, to serve as a fantasy player social network and repository for fantasy-related information and analysis.

– kaChing seeks to use open-source principles and social networking to allow users to follow the investment practices of more accomplished users. It’s fantasy expertise for the stock-trading players.

A roundup of posts from the FSB News page:

– Content from The Sports Network will now be available to mobile-phone users globally.

– Ashton Kutcher plans to extend his Web business pursuits into fantasy football.

– An AOL Fanhouse blogger takes issue with the notion that fantasy hockey has gotten too serious. (The response is to this column on About.com.)

– The Washington Times takes a look at the trend of mixing fantasy football with social networks.

– A Colorado Fox affiliate profiles Sara Holladay, an actual librarian whom you might know as the Fantasy Football Librarian.

– There’s at least some concern in England that big-money backers are changing the landscape of Premiership soccer.

– Welcome DraftMix.com to the genre of fantasy competition that renews on a daily or weekly basis.

If you’re going to launch a website that seeks to compete with mainstream sports content providers as well as wildly popular social-networking sites such as Facebook, you had better know what you’re doing. There’s little worry about that when you’re a former Yahoo! executive who last headed sports, entertainment and studios before leaving the company in 2006.

That’s the background that David Katz brings to the new site SportsFanLive.com, which has launched its beta version for public use.

Katz sees shortcomings for sports fans in the currently mass-produced formats mentioned above. He told The New York Times that the major sports sites “are fundamentally all the same — imbued with traditional media DNA … and not built for the next generation and for the evolving needs of sports fans.”

As for existing social networks, Katz says that although there are sports presences, the sites don’t really reach out to fans in particular.

“Facebook and other social network sites do a good job of connecting you to people all over your life, but it’s not relevant to your sports interests,” he told the Times. “We’re isolating that subset of sports friends and giving you instant communication with them.”

Katz, who also formerly worked for CBS, touts the aggregation of information sources in his new venture. He says that Sports Fan Live will draw from about 4,500 providers, rather than the hundreds he says mainstream sports sites tap.

Although Katz decided not to run any fantasy games through the new site, the venture — if successful — could be another way for fantasy players to connect, as is the case with recent social offerings by The Fantasy Football Times and FanSoft Media. One particularly interesting tool is the FanFinder, which purports to allow users to locate other fans of specific teams so that folks might gather to watch games.

It would be easy for a startup site to get crushed in the rush to combine sports and social networking right now, but the experience, capital and positioning brought by Katz at least gives SportsFanLive.com strong initial standing.