A few days ago, we announced our new partnership with Getty Images that will give all writers full access to the world’s best photographs.

Today, we are rolling out a new feature that will capture the full power of those images — Slideshows.

Many of you have noticed a few of these Slideshows around the site in recent weeks. This was part of a pilot process to see if readers would take to a new, more visually-focused approach to articles. The response has been strong, and countless members have sent me messages requesting the ability to create them.

With Getty Images fully integrated into our Slideshow creator, we are ready to give it to everyone.

The Bleacher Report community has been thrilled with the continued increase in article quality over the last year, but we also realized that there is a visual aspect to sports that is, well…priceless. Until today, we had not found the right way to combine great writing with amazing photo-journalism.

This week’s tag-team release of Getty Images and Slideshows will be a huge step in that direction.

With the NBA season up and running, we’re looking for members of the B/R community to show off their basketball knowledge, and win some prizes in the process.

B/R is joining forces with WhatIfSports.com to ask writers to create “All-Anything” NBA teams. If you could make an NBA team that was built around one theme, what would it be? Would it be an all UCLA graduates team? An all 7-foot-tall players team? An all NBA draft bust team?

We’re looking for writers to get creative and have some fun with this, and once your article’s up, you can simulate how your team would match up against other teams through WhatIfSports.com. Just click here, and you’re ready to go.

Each person who submits articles with All-Anything teams will have a chance to win a Bleacher Report T-shirt, and everyone is guaranteed a free gift card from WhatIfSports.com to simulate how your team fares against other All-Anything teams.

Looking forward to seeing your rosters!

Hey all,

I just wanted to encourage all Major League Baseball fans to check out an exciting series Bleacher Report has running on Foxsports.com.

Keep up with the Angels (Scott Fowler), Brewers (Peter Bukowski), Cubs (Bob Warja), Dodgers (J.C. Ayvazi), Phillies (Claire Reclosado), Rays (Ben Weixlmann), Red Sox (Michael Lemaire) and White Sox (J.J. Stankevitz) throughout the playoffs with daily reactions and analysis.

Show some love for the tremendous efforts this group will make during the triumphs and pitfalls that is baseball in October.

Best,

Aron

The Bleacher Report team is pleased to formally announce a partnership with Fox Sports.

For the past five weeks, Foxsports.com has featured Bleacher Report articles on its front and league pages, alongside their in-house content.

This partnership is validation that Bleacher Report’s writers consistently contribute articles of such high quality that a premier mainstream sports network like Fox Sports is excited to feature them on their most-trafficked pages.

As the sports media landscape continues to evolve, more and more fans are looking for a reliable source of in-depth coverage for all the sports and teams that they follow.

Our team takes great pride in continuing to make improvements to a platform that empowers true sports experts to meet this demand by contributing great analysis and insights about the players, teams and leagues they know best.

We look forward to further synergies with Fox Sports and other future partners.

Click here to view a sampling of the Bleacher Report articles already featured on FoxSports.com.

Anyone who has been active in Bleacher Report’s NFL community recently has probably noticed the fresh writing of new BR contributor Chris Radez, usually about his Patriots and their current Sherman-like march through the NFL.

Well, it turns out that Chris is not only a great writer with a good head for NFL football. He also happens to be an administrator of TheScoreBoards, a great sports forum site that covers solid ground across all American pro sports.

We’ve always been a big fan of forums like TheScoreBoards and the type of free-flowing fan discussion you can find there. After talking to Chris, we learned that his forum members had been yearning for a way to write more full-bodies editorial analysis.

Sensing that a great fit was apparent, we put our heads together and are happy to announce a new partnership in which TheScoreBoards will become the official forum of our NFL Community.

TheScoreBoards is now featuring Bleacher Report articles on their NFL forum pages, and their football-friendly posters will be making their way to Bleacher Report to share their opinions in article-form.

In turn, we’ll be promoting TheScoreBoards as a great destination for the Bleacher Report community to continue the debate from our NFL articles.

To learn more about the partnership and what’s in store, check out this post over at TheScoreBoards.

We’ll be continuing to add more partners to other sections of the site so we can expose the Bleacher Report community to great sports destinations around the web while also getting Bleacher Report articles out there to wider audiences.

Stay tuned to the BR Blog for more announcements.

The cat is out of the bag. After weeks of speculation, Google is set to announce tonight their new OpenSocial set of API’s, a counterpoint to Facebook’s Platform and a new way of creating social web applications for multiple platforms. Bleacher Report has been working under the shroud of secrecy as an early tester of OpenSocial while during Google’s beta of the API (first impression=promising, but very buggy). Now, in anticipation of OpenSocial’s commercial release, we’re getting ready to roll out our own social apps.

What does this have to do with the Open Source Sports Network?

Well, first off, we just dig open platforms. Bleacher Report was conceived as an open platform for sports journalism, and we’re working to catch up on the software side.

More to the point, we were among the first sports sites to jump on the Facebook Platform bandwagon, rolling out our College Football application within weeks of the F8 announcement and quickly attracting over 100,000 users.

Bleacher Report is all about consolidating the insight and expertise of sports fans and then spreading it to as many places as possible. Our writers bring offer their knowledge to the community, and in turn it’s our job to get that knowledge as much exposure as possible.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working here at the Bleacher Report HQ as well as down at the Google Plex to get our applications ready for OpenSocial. When the curtain rises, we’ll be ready to roll out some pretty sweet social apps that will provide new ways for sports fans to flex their knowledge, as well as spread Bleacher Report content to new audiences.

So soon in addition to Facebook, your Bleacher Report articles could be showing up on MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, Friendster, and other OpenSocial partners as they come on board. Plus, some of the stuff we’re developing for OpenSocial will eventually find its way back to Bleacher Report in the form of new features.

This has been an exciting project to work on here at BR, and an overwhelmingly positive experience working with Google and some of the other third party participants in on the beta.

We’re excited about exposing the Bleacher Report community to even more platforms, and will have some more announcements to make along these lines in the near future.