My live MLB.com story on all the Opening Day games and pageantry >

Welcome to a brand-new Major League Baseball season, and the best one ever for a fan. The first time I went to a big-league game was 1973 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, and seeing that big, endless green expanse of carpet and the Big Red Machine, I couldn’t imagine anything bigger.

Now it’s 2007 and one of the many improved parts of a baseball fan’s life is being able to have an MLBlog with your own team’s look and feel and a chance to chronicle an entire season starting with these openers. It’s your own space, and be on the lookout during the course of this season as social networking elements probably will change the game dramatically here.

Glad to have so many Rookies showing up around the clock, creating pages with their own personalities and interests. Some are here for fantasy, some are here to write a game story a day, some are here to chronicle a road trip to see every MLB park in one summer, some are here to promote their new book or even another blog, some are here to connect with their fans like Tigers pitcher Nate Robertson or Phillies VP/PR Larry Shenk or Raymond the Tampa Bay mascot. Here are some of the basics to know since there are so many newcomers:

The promo spaces on mlblogs.com are maintained by a couple of guys from MLB Advanced Media, self included. We try to keep our eye on as much as we can, and the goal is to highlight some of the coolest things about MLBlogs, including our own MLB personalities. Any day now there will be another new way at MLB.com of showing off fan-generated content, and I’ll keep you posted. Newcomers are listed in the Rookies category, and then moved over to the MLBlogs Active Roster, which you can find by scrolling that blue panel or clicking the browse-by-team page.

Hey, everyone, if you are going to use other people’s content, and that includes MLB.com articles, videos, photos, stats — and we encourage MLBloggers to do so — could you please reciprocate by linking to MLB.com? It’s not good form to ever copy a big text block from another writer’s story, and I see a lot of that in the overall blogosphere, where a lot of people never took a college libel law or ethics class. Please don’t do it — mention it and LINK TO IT. Acknowledge that someone else is the reporter and you are opining on that matter, unless you’ve done the legwork yourself. OK? That’s my main rant. You gather the news, you are the source of information for others. We at MLB.com are the only place that has traveling beat writers for both MLB.com clubs at every game, and hopefully you will feel free to write anything you want about their articles but just please link to their articles and don’t post their articles. Just remember the source of original news coverage, something that needs to be more recognized.

MLBlogs are linked from throughout MLB.com and the 30 MLB team sites we maintain, and nowhere else in the blogosphere will you find anything even close to that demographically perfect promotion: Only baseball fans. The best thing you can do to help get a lot of readers is to be really passionate about your blog, posting often, using various media including photo albums. The more often you post, the more you show up in the Recently Updated Weblogs, which is always going to get you clicks because that feed not only shows up on MLBlogs.com but also on the side panel of all MLBloggers who activate that (most). Other ways to get more eyeballs include:

- Being a Spheroid. Just look through previous posts here, and send an email to us with SPHEROID in the subject and give your answers to those same nine questions.
- Comment on other blogs. MLBlogs or otherwise. Wherever you comment, make it a cardinal rule to ALWAYS leave your blog’s URL as the signature, so anyone can click that and find you. And also feel free to comment here and tell people about a great post you just saved.
- Trade links. Use the Typelist categories to create groups of your favorite blogs, and make sure that other blogger knows you’re linking so you can get inbound links. The more of those the merrier.
- Send an email to all of your friends/family letting them know you have an MLBlog.
- Go on the air at MLB.com. As you can see from the Multimedia category on the MLBlogs.com homepage, for the last two seasons we have been putting a different MLBlogger of the Week on the "Under the Lights" show every Friday night during the season. I’ll send everyone a notification soon to let you know when we will resume this, and best to just comment here if you’re interested in being on the air. Last year it was typically in the 10 p.m. ET hour, usually by call-in to our NYC studio or in-person for those in the NYC area. It’s a great way to say your URL over and over while talking baseball.

If you ever have issues with your Typepad software, send a Help ticket to Six Apart (our tech partner on these) so that it can be resolved. Also feel free to mention here. Other MLBloggers always are ready and willing to help you out with questions/problems.

Also please remember to add your comments to those other in my "Season 3" post below. I asked everyone for suggestions on what you want to see in the ultimate social network for baseball fans.

MLBlogs is an Official MLB.com Affiliate, Unofficial Opinions. We’ll do our best to make people notice you, and from there it’s totally your voice. All we ask is that you pay attention to the Terms of Use from us and Six Apart. Only three MLBloggers have had to be thrown out of the park since we launched this in April 2005, and two of those were in the first month or so. Also, Six Apart provided the profanity filter, which has hundreds of words/terms. Just shout if you notice something that definitely should not be included or should be included; we inherited that.

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is illegal to use MLB official marks and logos or game footage in any digital capacity other than at MLBlogs. That’s why so many myspacers or gootubers are routinely flagged by MLB legal and forced to remove them. Have fun with it here, and again, we expect to be greatly expanding this universe hopefully by around midseason.

Now back to watching the first of 13 openers today, and you can find my in-progress global story about all the games on the MLB.com homepage through day and night. Hope you like our new supermediawall fixture on the homepage, btw. Have a great season! It’s the best day of all.

If you haven’t experienced MLB.TV Mosaic today then I would say this even if I wasn’t part of the MLBAM team here that is making it happen: YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS. I have been surrounded by tech wunderkinds all day who also are baseball fans and can’t even believe how much fun this technology is. It is a true game-changer. Just being able to drag-and-drop any game into your main screen is like Ben Sheets throwing a two-hit shutout. This is pretty awesome, and you can get up to speed on the discussion of it with my colleague Justin Shaffer’s MLB.TV Mosaic Blog right here. Mosaic’s streaming speed is twice as fast as last year, making it even more exciting. You can even hook your computer up to a big-screen TV and do all the manipulation on your computer and treat that as your monitor. And you can track fantasy players in an unprecedented way. You just have to see it.