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

– Mediapost’s OMMA talks fantasy among the fun hobbies that induce serious investments of time and money from participants. The writer talks with Craig Davis of Fantasy Planet for some specifics on our industry.

– Steve Gardner of USA Today takes an interesting look through the 10 most-asked fantasy baseball questions according to Ask.com (and, of course, the answers) — broken down into Part 1 and Part 2.

– Another interesting bit from USA Today’s Steve Gardner: We fantasy folks tend to rely on as much math as possible, particularly when it comes to baseball. But at what point do you go too far for your audience?

– Online Media Daily recently spoke with David Katz, vice president of Yahoo! Mobile North America, to find out more about the company’s mobile strategies. Fantasy, for what it’s worth, came up several times.

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According to this article on DailyFinance.com, some major-media fantasy producers report that women are consuming their content and games in ever-increasing amounts.

Frankly, there’s a lack of clarity in the numbers reported, but here are some highlights from the story:

– ESPN.com says average minutes spent on fantasy pages by female visitors rose 7 percent in June. (Unforunately, we aren’t told whether that’s over June 2008 or May 2009.)

– ESPN estimates that 18 percent of the audience for its online fantasy content is female and that its year-over-year female fantasy audience grew in the “low double-digit percentages” in 2008.

– Yahoo! Sports’ David Geller estimates that 12 percent of the fantasy players on his site are women.

The numbers seem to be in line with Fantasy Sports Trade Association-sponsored Ipsos studies that have pegged the female fantasy audience somewhere around 20 percent (though a much smaller portion of the group that actually spends money on fantasy content and games).

The rest of the Daily Finance article jumps around quite a bit and confuses a few things (the FSTA and the Fantasy Sports Association, for instance), but here are a couple of other noteworthy quotes:

– RotoWire president Peter Schoenke: “Yahoo will face tough competition from Fox which has some ’serious building blocks’ such as broadcasting NFL games.”

– Geller, of Yahoo! Sports: “Fantasy sports tend to be recession proof.”

Back at the end of May, we reported that Yahoo! is developing an iPhone fantasy sports application later this year. Those who play Yahoo! fantasy sports don’t have to wait for that, though.

The Y! Fan app is already available for users of the iPhone, iPod Touch and BlackBerry.

“I kept forgetting to set my hockey fantasy roster and couldn’t do it easily from my iPhone,” co-creator Marco Palermo tells FSB.com, in explaining why they developed the product.

The app comes in free and pay ($3.99) versions. The former allows you to manage no more than one team per sport and offers very basic league viewing and management capabilities. A user can check on his or her players and standings, for instance, and make lineup changes, but waiver moves and trades cannot be carried out.

In the pay version, you can control as many teams as you want, and add/drop and trade capabilities are available. It also allows users access to league message boards.

Overall, the draw to using the application rather than the main site would seem to be a cleaner interface. The Yahoo! pages tend to be quite busy, and navigating through any necessary moves often seems to take more focus than the single-tap zooms that you can employ on other sites through your iPhone.

I don’t own an iPhone but did try both versions of the app on my iPod. The presentation is certainly much cleaner and more ready to use than when I visit the Yahoo! fantasy pages. One thing I miss, however, is easier navigation between teams in the same league, so that I can check out potential trade targets without starting the process of actually proposing something. The offer to upgrade to the pro version that I have to turn down every time I start up the free app is also a bit annoying.

The other thing to point out is that if you don’t do your fantasy team maintenance on the go, then you probably have no use for an application like this. New toys are always cool, but you’ll obviously have more control over your teams via the main site.

If you find yourself having to make lineup changes from the backseat of a cab or talk some trash to leaguemates while your stuck in a meeting, then the Y! Fan app makes it easier to work one-handed.

The download site is currently unavailable, but Palermo says that updated editions are in the approval stages right now and should be released sometime next week.

Yesterday we spotlighted the companies that claimed multiple plaques at the Fantasy Sports Writers Association awards ceremony, but there were seven other honors handed out Tuesday.

Here are the victors in those remaining categories, as well as the other finalists with whom they competed:

Football Writer
Andy Behrens, Yahoo Sports
Jay Clemons, Sports Illustrated
Jeff Pasquino, Footballguys

Football Print Article
Dan Grogan, Athlon
Ginny Loveless, Football Diehards
Matt Waldman, Football Diehards

Football Print Publication
CBS Sports/Pro Football Weekly
RotoWire
Rotoworld

Baseball Print Article
Andy Behrens, Yahoo Sports
Jason Grey, ESPN
Tim Heaney, KFFL

Baseball Web Article
Jeff Erickson, RotoWire
David Gonos, Open Sports
Eno Sarris, Baseballguys

Hockey Writer
Sean Allen, ESPN
Janet Eagleson, RotoWire
Scott Pianowski, Yahoo Sports

Humor Article
Jeremy Fisher, Fantasy Football Trader
Lenny Pappano, Draft Sharks
Geoffrey Stein, Mock Draft Central