DigitalSports.com is a local sports media company that will aim to cater to a national audience. For now, the service is limited to Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington D.C.

No matter what state you live in, at DigitalSports.com you can access information about local High School and Club Sports & Activities. Information is not only supplied by the people who designed the website; users generate content by sharing accomplishments of those that participate in youth sports in their communities. The goal of DigitalSports.com is threefold: inform, entertain, and inspire, all while solely focusing on the positives of child athletes and hashing out any negatives that may occur in youth athletics.

The DigitalSports.com platform is meant for the children that participate in local athletics; however, their parents, fans, and coaches may benefit from the services provided. Included in the site are professionally written articles about local sports coupled with extensive video and photos of prior events. The setup allows alumni of the local sports to look back and re-live some of their own memories through the posted content. In fact, Joey Dorsey can reminisce about the old days when he led his highschool team to an undefeated record much like this year’s Memphis Tigers. Think he was still missing about half his free throws back then? DigitalSports.com provides you the video to see for yourself.

My favorite aspect about the site is that the executives are committed to only displaying positive stories, photos, and videos. If you subscribe to ESPN.com’s general feed you will notice that at least half of the stories deal with a guy holding out of practice, a drug bust, or Chris Henry. DigitalSports.com won’t cover any of those issues. Twenty high school athletic conferences representing 350 schools are currently examined and 2,500 pieces of original content are produced per month. Join now and see what the site has to offer.

When will the social network bubble burst? Has it already been popped? I do not really know anybody who uses any social friending site other than Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or possibly Plaxo, on a frequent basis. That surely has not deterred CAA, MLB Advanced Media, and a company called Pequot Ventures to form a new youth sports social network. WePlay.com is geared towards athletes between the ages of 6-16, their parents, and their coaches.

WePlay.com’s mission: to enable and enhance the joy of sports for kids, families, coaches and fans both online and on the field. What the hell does that mean? Oh wait…read down a couple of paragraphs on the press release: young athletes can create profiles, blogs and fan clubs, play games, connect with friends and create a highlight reel. How innovative! Children are already doing all of this on MySpace.

Their business platform is to find revenue in advertisements on the WePlay.com site (how innovative…sarcasm). It seems like 5,000 new social networks sprout up every day with this same goal in mind. Create a social network for a niche group of people, don’t make them pay to be members, and make money off of advertisements. My guess is that most of the sites fizzle out after making pennies. Why do CAA, MLB Advanced Media and this Pequot group believe that WePlay.com will be any different?

For one, Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, LeBron James, and Tony Parker are among its athlete founders. Will the endorsement of those athletes and whatever equity they have in the venture be enough to make it successful? It seems that their backing has allowed WePlay.com to generate a bunch of buzz thus far, even making a story on SportsAgentBlog.com! But what about longterm? When the hype dies in a week, will the site survive?

It definitely has strong financial backing behind it. The site has already been financed with $4.5 million dollars. Personally, I do not care how much money you have behind something, if the idea stinks and is not innovative, it is destined to fail (or at least not be profitable). Like my colleague Jason Peck over at Take a Peck, I took WePlay.com for a short test drive. I understand that it is only in Beta, but I was thoroughly unimpressed. I agree with Jason, it is early on in the game for WePlay.com and I should wait a little while before I get too critical. But from what I see as their mission and their original product, I think this is a wrong move by all parties involved in its success (however, there is no loss to the athletes that do not invest any money into it).