It is 2009 and in Barack Obama, America has now inaugurated our county's first African American President. There is a saying that you don't know what anyone has went through unless you have walked in their shoes. I being an African American have been personally victimized by racism from police, regular stores and of course by some ignorant people. It was only some 40-50 some odd years ago that people of my race couldn't use the same facilities or go to certain places because of racism.

One of the things we want to do here at New England Sports Blog is serve as a portal for news and information related to the sports interests of our members as well as our larger community of visitors. We currently do that to some extent with our headlines ports and 247 News aggregations as well as with many of the articles we publish and discussions spawned by those current news.

We want to take it further though and while we still have a long to-do list, we are pleased today to announce our new Feeds section which is now publically available in our main menu. There you will find RSS, Atom and other XML news feeds from many of the best sites around the web that are fed to NESB with fresh news about your favorite teams and leagues updated throughout the day.

Currently we have news coming into our site from around 100 sources in five categories. Each source in those categories will provide you with up to the ten most recent items published there in either excerpt or full form. Some also provide you with audio and video feeds. Altogether, there's right at 1,000 of the latest published items from others available right here on our site around the clock.

Over time, we'll be expanding our Feeds area with both more categorization and more high quality content. We feel for now though that we have enough good stuff in there to open the section up for public consumption. What we hope is to provide you with a one stop news center for the latest in New England sports and beyond.

A couple of weeks ago I installed a tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not. I tweaked it a bit today in order to, 1. make it more interactive and, 2. limit the showing of snap shot previews to the tiny snap shot icons you will see to the right of outbound links.

Should you decide this feature is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

I want to take this time-out to introduce and welcome our new Staff Writer to New England Sports Blog, Peter J. Umbrianna.  Peter will be blogging daily on the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, Red Sox and various other NESB topics.  Our new Staff Writer will fit in very well around here because he is a big time New England Sports fan and is more than ready to share his thoughts with the NESB Community.

Thank you for accepting the invitation to join our Staff.  Welcome aboard Peter!