Yarbarker, a social sports news and opinion web site, said this week it has raised seed funding from an impressive lineup of angel investors. Russell Siegelman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, led the round which also included Ron Conway, Steve Blank, Ronnie Lott and Harris Barton. Early-stage venture capital firm Labrador Ventures also participated.

The firm recently redesigned its web site that provides bloggers with more tools and readers with more personalization options. Another smart new offering is having professional athletes blog exclusively on the Yarbarker site. It's all designed to dramatically boost traffic over the next 12 months and draw in a handful of large brand advertisers.

I spoke with Yardbarker co-founder Pete Vlastelica this evening about the company's development but he was careful not to give too much away. He thinks that Yardbarker's human-edited approach to categorizing the news will give it a leg up on algorithmic-based competition such as Ballbug, Ballhype and Digg. And the breadth of its content offering that can be contributed by any sports blogger out there differentiates its service from giants such as ESPN, Fox Sports, SI and CBS Sportsline that don't focus on aggregation.

Yarbarker has knowledgable investors on board, a market of 70 million sports fans in front it and a media model growing increasingly fragmented each day. If Yardbarker can give bloggers a compelling reason to promote their content and then present those articles in a way that hooks its audience, the company could hit a homerun.

Tags: yardbarker, kpcb, vc, venture+capital