The 2006 World Cup is here. There are many bloggers discussing the game and rooting for their country's team. Mainstream media sites have also launched blogs dedicated to the World Cup. This post discusses a few items of interest to blogs and the World Cup. It also includes lists of blogs covering the World Cup. Note: when we refer to football in this post we are talking about soccer not American football. Like the name of one blog suggests: Footballs are Round. Footballs will always be round in our World Cup blog coverage and not oblong like in our Super Bowl coverage. Tony Karon at Mother Jones explains just how important this game is worldwide to its three billion viewers.
No global event commands anything close to the attention paid the World Cup on all five continents. As many as 3 billion people are expected to watch some of it on TV, while 250 million more will cluster around radios to follow every play.
World Cup is the top search today on Technorati and one of the top tags. BlogPulse has a graph that shows how the World Cup dominates over other events like the NBA championships and the French Open.
The World Cup got off to a grim start when the manufacturer of the Goleo mascots went bust.
Adidas has made a special golden ball called Teamgeist Berlin for use in the final game. More about the Teamgeist ball can be found here.
Health Risks: The World Cup Blog reports that watching the world cup could kill you. Hearts attacks rose 25% in England when their team was in the finals. (via The Blogging Times)
Boing Boing received a pre-emptive warning not to use soccer videos from a lawfirm. It made Boing Boing angry: "Oh brother. I don't even know what the FIFA World Cup is. I'm guessing it's soccer, which I hate just as much as any other pro sport. Every editor at Boing Boing detests professional sports, and we would sooner stream a video of a crumpled up paper napkin in the corner of a room than show some jackasses running after a ball."
Editor & Publisherreports that the New York Times will be liveblogging the World Cup. They already live blogged the opening ceremony.
Deadspin has a short roundup of some blogs and sites covering the World Cup.
SoccerBlogs.net is an aggregator of soccer blogs and you can follow headlines from multiple blogs as they are posted. A complete list of the blogs on Soccer Blogs can be found here.
The U.S. Soccer website can be found here. They also have a blog. It's located on the right side of the website. Here is how they describe their blog, which is called U.S. Soccer Blog: "For the 2006 FIFA World Cup, ussoccer.com is on the bus, in the meal room, at training, in the locker room and at the hotel to bring you those little tantalizing nuggets most people usually never find out."
The BootsnAll Travel Network has launched a World Cup Blog that features fan blogs written for all 32 teams competing in the World Cup. More about the launch of this blog network here.
Not so slow: The MSM is always as slow as everyone thinks. The Guardian
had a blog for the 2002 World Cup. They are back this year with a blog for the 2006 World Cup.
Here is a list of some new blogs launched specifically for the 2006 World Cup.
There are also blogs that cover soccer (football) frequently and naturally these blogs will also cover the World Cup. Here are few of these dedicated soccer blogs.
