High school sports is a fantastic market opportunity for those in the media business, and that’s why I’m excited to be a part of LocoFan.net, a social networking and personal publishing platform being launched by one of my clients, LCPP Inc.   As you may’ve noticed, high school sports has garnered much attention from the new media lately, including launches of stats-oriented services like HighSchoolSports.net and PrepSportsNation.com.

These sites are great, but they stop short of empowering the social discourse surrounding sports that makes prep athletics so much fun: I’m talking about boosting, smack talking, Saturday-morning quarterbacking, and of course, media sharing.  Recognizing the opportunity to seize on the great hunger for high school sports social outlets, LCPP and I have been working together on LocoFan.net for the last six months or so.  We hope you’ll enjoy the result.

It’s part Facebook, part Typepad, and part Sports Page. We’ve put several core features into this service that give it a unique sports feeling, while leveraging the essentials of Web 2.0:

• Full-blown personal publishing platform with XMLRPC support, so it’s compatible with Live Writer, Twitter, Technorati, and other services that leverage remote posting / browsing.
• Photo sharing with galleries.
• Video hosting and sharing.
• “Fans”:  Instead of buddies or friends, the node relationship between users on LocoFan is not mutually exclusive (something I’ve always found frustrating about MySpace).  That is, you can become somebody’s “Fan” even if they choose not to be your fan.
• Integrated private e-mail style messaging.  All the anonymity. None of the spam.
• “Faves”:  Pick your favorite teams, and the LocoFan network uses your Faves in a number of cool ways. You can Team Tag any post, placing your favorite team’s color block on your posting, and aggregating the post into that team’s dynamically-generated home page.
• LocoRank: Think your team has the most fans?  Think again.  LocoFan ranks teams according to the amount of activity associated with each team via Team Tags, so bragging rights are never in doubt.
• Super-easy customizable theme for your LocoBlog.  Pick your team colors and favorite fonts, and LocoFan gives your blog a special customized look. We’ve even included over a dozen widgets that you can snap into your blog’s sidebar to further customize.
• Avatars with links to the user’s LocoBlog are integrated throughout the site, in comments, posts, the “featured LocoFans” section of the home page, private messaging, and in your “Fanbox”, the area of your LocoBlog where the world can see who you’re a fan of.

So visit LocoFan, which is now in public beta.  There’s something fresh and new here, and I would love to hear your feedback.