Playgirl tabs Olbermann s*xiest newscaster
Talk about your well-run campaigns. Former “SportsCenter” co-host-turned-newsman Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” has been named TV’s sexiest male news anchor by a Playgirl magazine online poll. Olbermann humorously added a link on his “Countdown” site to the Playgirl site, and the strategy paid off as he claimed 24 percent of the more than 50,000 votes cast. The anchor says any campaigning was done tongue-in-cheek and not his idea. Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity claimed second place with CNN’s Anderson Cooper third. Bill O’Reilly received around 200 write-in votes. Complete results of the poll will be published in Playgirl’s October issue.

Latest wacky eBay auction: Buy an AFL team
If you’re in the market for an Arena Football League team, log on to eBay. The Indiana Firebirds are for sale with a minimum bid of $1 million. Following Firebirds owner Dave Lageschulte’s decision last week to fold the franchise, a Firebirds exec had the bright idea of posting the team on the auction site. Apparently those on the team were less than thrilled with the concept, but AFL vice president of communications Chris McCloskey told reporters the league probably won’t stand in the way. He said that if eBay can come up with an applicant bearing a net worth of $60 million by Sept. 20, the application will be considered. AFL rules state that an owner must have $60 million in net worth and be approved by 75 percent of the board of directors. With the auction closing Thursday, there have been 21 bids, the highest reaching $2,760,303 from bidder aaronburro.

NFL & MLB sites register record web traffic
More people are turning to the web for sports information. The National Football League says NFL.com set a four-day opening record with 9.4 million visits to the site over opening weekend, up 38 percent from 6.8 million last year. Four million of last weekend’s visits came Sunday, up from 3.3 million in 2003. And yesterday, Major League Baseball Advanced Media announced its own record-breaking statistics with 730 million visits to MLB.com this year. This is an increase from this time last year’s 519 million visits and 650 million for the entirety of last year. MLB.com has also registered a record 7 billion page views this year, up from 3.1 billion during the same period last year and 4 billion for all of last year.

New Japanese toy: Stop and hear the flowers
Talk about flower power. Their therapeutic effect has been turned up a notch with Ka-on, which means “flower sound” in Japanese. The new machine is comprised of a donut-shaped magnet and coil at the base of a vase that connects to a CD player, stereo or TV. Once flowers are placed in the vase and Ka-on is turned on, the magnet and coil relay the sound vibrations up the stems through the plant’s water tubes, turning them into speakers. You can hear the music seep out of the petals and feel it shake through the leaves. Unlike regular speakers, which direct sound one way, Ka-on disperses sound in all directions, filling a whole room with music. Later this month, the makers of Ka-on will release a speakerphone model that allows the user to participate in a telephone conversation with a flower.