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

– Sirius XM has held on to hosts Ray Flowers and Kyle Elfrink of the Fanball Fantasy Drive show, which is now called Sirius XM Fantasy Drive. Flowers, the creator of BaseballGuys.com, has also joined RotoWire as a contributing writer.

– From the recent Herald-News obituary of 86-year-old Emma Bianchi of Joliet, Ill.: “When Emma died Dec. 11 at the age of 86, the family lost a diehard fantasy football player. Eleven years ago, Laureen’s then-sixth grade son started a fantasy football team and asked Emma to join it. At first, Emma didn’t quite understand the logistics and selected her players based on ‘He’s got such a nice German name,’ or ‘He works so hard for his community.’” We can only guess that she also loved David Hasselhoff.

– With the Academy Awards coming up this weekend, here’s a plug for the fantasy-style games of Picktainment, which changed its name from AwardsPicks.com with the addition of games for American Idol and Dancing with the Stars.

– Steve Gardner of USA Today passes along and builds off another blogger’s pondering of whether the rise of the machines will consume fantasy sports analysis.

– You’ve probably already seen this, since it was reported by Sports Business Journal and passed along by Pro Football Talk. It’s worth noting that EA Sports will be getting a break on its rights fees for 2011 as a result of the labor strife, in exchange for a one-year extension to their deal through 2013. One has to wonder if a similar deal is available to any of the many others who pay annual rights fees.

– SI.com’s Joe Lemire recently offered an ode to Strat-O-Matic baseball for this year’s 50th anniversary.

– This agent blogger ponders the impact that Bloomberg’s foray into baseball statistical analysis — to which 17 MLB teams now subscribe — may have on player contract negotiations.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to matt.schauf@worldfantasygames.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

We introduced you back in July to the joint efforts of FFSpin.com and FantasyFootballCrystalBall.com to gauge the accuracy of weekly fantasy rankings. Now that gauge has found an in-season home via USAToday.com.

On Wednesday, USA Today’s Fantasy Joe site carried the introductory post for this “Rank the Rankings” process.

“The difference between victory and defeat can be as slim as inserting an upstart tight end in place of an established veteran facing a difficult match up and the start/sit advice of a preferred site can catapult or cripple a team,” FF Spin co-founder Scott Pashley wrote. “Finally there is a way to know how your favorite fantasy football sites are performing relative to the rest of the experts promising winning prognostications.”

Each Wednesday throughout the season, the two sites will announce via this outlet which “experts” were most accurate with their rankings for the previous week, taking a look at each position and overall performance. This coming Wednesday — the day before the NFL opener — they promise to reveal the top-performing weekly rankers for all of 2009.

Despite small potential pitfalls such as accounting for different scoring formats and the effects of injuries, FSB.com encourages these kinds of efforts as a nice method for at least helping the consumer sort through the multitude of fantasy-content options existing today.

This weekly model probably provides even greater accuracy for a few reasons. Long-term injuries won’t impact the measures as much as they can with pre-season rankings, and week-to-week recommendations rely more heavily on actual performance and matchups. It also gets rid of the effect of draft strategy in initial rankings, whereby a backup behind an injury-prone starting running back might often sit higher than his actual expected points would otherwise dictate.

We’ll be checking Fantasy Joe on Wednesday to see the 2009 results and keeping an eye on the 2010 reports.

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

– New Sporting News publisher Jeff Price spoke earlier this month about his decision to dump fantasy games and focus on content. The story also mentions, however, a plan to bring games back to SN, perhaps as early as this football season — likely something that incorporates social media.

– OPEN Sports is going after a third round of venture-capital funding, according to Sports Business Journal, after two initial rounds that tallied $14 million in backing.

– USA Today fantasy writer Steve Gardner says that fantasy owners who think they’re smart should try simulation games that put them in complete control.

– A partnership with the MasterCraft Pro Wakeboard Tour will mean a $1,000 grand prize at the end of the season for the winner of the Fantasy Action Sports League game, which is free to enter.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

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

– Visitors to FantasyPlayers.com — which is owned by Fantasy Sports Ventures and serves as the online home for their Fantasy Players Network — will notice that the site is currently redirecting to KFFL.com. KFFL’s Ryan Bonini told FSB.com that this is a temporary move while the company is “revamping” FantasyPlayers.com. We’ll check back in with details on the changes once the site is back up.

– The ESPN 30 for 30 fantasy documentary Silly Little Game premiered tonight, and here’s a semi-review Steve Gardener of USA Today. (We had to DVR it here at FSB.com headquarters for viewing after a week and a half of visiting the South.)

– As part of its promotion for Silly Little Game, ESPN.com put together a quick quiz on the origination of rotisserie baseball. (I got a decent 7 out of 10 correct, without cheating. I swear on my Rafael Palmeiro rookie card.)

– Ireland-based Ubecha.com is launching what seems to be a daily-game style fantasy platform for the upcoming World Cup. The press release is short on specific details of the game, but the general description seems to be in line with the short-turnaround, quick-payout games that have been popping up all over the place on the American fantasy sports scene recently. (The name of the site and discussion of “betting” in the release exemplifies a different marketplace the one governed by the UIGEA.)

– Harsh Jain of Dream11 has this writeup on the growing Internet market in India and the growth potential for fantasy sports in that market, particularly cricket.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).