:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/assets/534555/NNafterdark2.jpg)
It's Monday morning in Europe, late, late Sunday night in America and Niners Nation After Dark is back. Last call is at 2:45 but the party moves on to the Golden Nuggets at 3am and you're more than welcome to bring your drinks into the next party.
Over the weekend I found out that Niners Nation was one of the five finalists for best NFL team blog in About.com's Readers' Choice Awards 2011. For them it's a chance to drive page views. For us, it's a chance for a little bit of exposure, and some fun times trying to drive up our vote count. After a slow start, Niners Nation has picked up some steam and climbed from last place to third place. We've got some space before we'll reach second place, but it's well within reach.
The poll is open until March 15 so head on over to vote. You just click on the link for NinersNation.com in the short list and it'll tally a vote for us. Also feel free to pass this along to your friends. I tweeted this out to all the 49ers players on Twitter and got a few re-tweets, which has really helped to get the vote out. Patrick Willis, Joe Staley, Adam Snyder, Ricky Jean-Francois, and Keaton Kristick all retweeted the link for me. Hopefully we'll get some more players later today. Either way, Twitter has made player/fan interactions all the more interesting.
Since we've got some time tonight to sort of "explore the studio space" here, I was curious what kind of football sites everybody visits. About.com has nominations for the team blogs, but they also have nominations for best football blog as a whole. The nominees include ESPN's NFL Nation (all those blogs like Sando's), Kissing Suzy Kolber, Pro Football Talk's Rumor Mill, and Yahoo! Shutdown Corner. That's kind of an interesting mix of sites. Does anybody have sites beyond that they check out? If you have some free time, checking out SB Nation's NFL hub site. Joel Thorman of Arrowhead Pride is the primary editor, but they get a ton of contributions from around the network.