by Brion Lau

What about a sports fan? Car buff? Fashion? Why am I asking?

Tonight I attended an event featuring entrepreneurs who have made the transition from employees to starting their own business. One of the panel speakers was Dave Lu, founder of FanPop.

The FanPop concept is simple: as a fan you can create a ’spot’ which collects together links to news stories, video clips, blogs, photos, forums and other online resources. All these links are submitted by Fanpop users, who can vote on each other’s links to highlight the best.

Lu had already been experimenting with blogs, affiliate marketing, and contextual advertising (Google adsense). In fact, he was running a blog called EOSrebels prior to launching FanPop. He soon realized there was an opportunity to create a platform where fans of all niches could come together to swap links and pool information.

According to TechDigest’s article on FanPop, Lu states, “Why not multiply that site by a thousand and give people an easy way to share their links and videoclips for all kinds of niche subjects?” he says. “You can search on Google or Yahoo, but there’s no context around what the results are, to tell you if they’re good. Social bookmarking sites do that kind of thing, but they’re disorganised and tag-based, and don’t build a community around those tags.”

For now, the site is still in beta, focused on growing its fans, and driving revenue through contextual advertisements (Google Adsense). Also, I can’t help but mention Dave Lu sounds just like David Liu from my previous article on Faqqly.com!

[Note to Mike: go create your fanpop page on the Red Sox. Lu says there's not enough sports enthusiasts yet.]

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