Website: www.mlbtraderumors.com

Interview With: Tim Dierkes

When did you start MLB Trade Rumors?

November of 2005.

What made you start it?

I had first started a fantasy site, RotoAuthority.com. I found myself equally if not more interested in hot stove info, and it didn’t seem to belong on the fantasy site.

What is your background?

I graduated from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. I worked in search engine marketing from graduation to present.

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career? What is your goal with this blog?

Both, but I am definitely trying to make it a career. My goal is to become a full-time blogger for at least a few years and see where it takes me. It would be cool to accumulate a solid network of inside sources over the next 10-15 years, maybe get a few good exclusives here and there.

What was your tipping point? What put you on the map?

Probably the 2006 July trading deadline, when I took the day off work and covered rumors nonstop. A lot of new readers came to the site and stuck around.

MLB Trade Rumors is a crowded space especially since you are directly competing with the big media guys. How have you been able to separate yourself from the pack?

One thing big media sites seem reluctant to do is link out to other big media sites. I have no such restrictions, so I’m able to aggregate every published rumor out there in one easy-to-read format.

What type of blogging software do you use?

TypePad.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

It will be gradual, but the Internet will overtake print media as the top medium for sports news in my lifetime. The turnaround for getting news into the newspaper is just too long for people these days. It may be the same journalists breaking the stories, but more and more of them will do so on their blogs minutes after getting the scoop.

STN’s Take:

One can tell by looking at MLB Trade Rumors that Tim is an extraordinarily hard worker. We are really glad we created our STN Top 25 Sports Bloggers List because we didn’t even know about his blog. He does a great job of getting all the information around the web and keeping it up do date on a hourly basis. He briefly mentions that since college he has worked in Search Engine Marketing and it makes sense because every time you search “MLB Trade Rumor” or “San Francisco Trade Rumor” in Google he is either first or second. We would have to say that so far Tim is the #1 free agent at this point in the blogging world. With the kind of traffic and the type of worker he is, a media company would be stupid not to snatch him up. Maybe he has had offers or maybe he just wants to go at it alone.

If one wants to find out info about baseball trade rumors, there is only one place to go, MLB Trade Rumors.