The Many Ways to Enjoy the 2010 World Cup Online

In 1982 I was living in Toronto, Canada and my dad and I watched just about every match of that World Cup together. Italy’s goal-scoring hero, Paolo Rossi, became my idol for a year or so before my allegiance moved to Manchester United’s Frank Stapleton. Regardless, I remember sitting in front of a tiny tv watching a poor picture transmitted from Spain. It was enjoyable an enjoyable and engrossing tournament and one that changed my life forever. I was more obsessed with the game than anything else. I also loved the Italian team (think “Breaking Away”) and my dad looked everywhere for a photo of the team for me. Eventually, he found one at an Italian restaurant in Toronto’s Little Italy – this was months after the tournament and the picture appeared on a box of biscotti. Needless to say, it was tough to find information, photos and no chance finding videos of the players or matches.

In 2010 everything in different. There is so much chatter and information online that if you don’t want to know the result of a match you literally need to cease all communication to the outside World – no cell phones, no landlines, no twitter, no facebook, nothing online. However, if you do want to stay connected and you can’t get to a TV it’s never been easier and more thorough.

Twitter issued a statement saying they would be expecting outages in their service as people were tweeting non-stop during the matches. During the USA v England match more than 1 billion tweets were sent in 90 minutes. You can join Twitter’s World Cup conversation (and make a little soccer ball appear in your tweet) by using “#worldcup” in your post. If you use the right three letter hashtag, such as #usa or #rsa you can make a flag show up. So, when you’re quickly browsing tweets you see tons of little flags and instantly see just how many people are talking about this tournament.

There are about 20 ways to watch the matches online (the link was supplied by one of our Italian Twitter followers) and apparently only one of them is legal – ESPN3.com. However, you have to have Verizon as your ISP, so we make due and use sites like iraqgoals.net, justin.tv and others. If you do have ESPN3 access you can watch matches on your phone. This sort of thing still astounds me. Even if you can’t watch the actual matches you can listen on ESPN radio, follow along with the live stats and watch video replays of goals moments after they’ve happened.

Google has a World Cup calendar which syncs with regular Google Calendar and let’s people know you’re in a meeting when a match is on although we surely wouldn’t condone that sort behavior. Speaking of calendars, there are literally thousands of calendars and brackets out there, but none as beautiful as the one put out by Spain’s La Marca.

For those of you who actually want to venture out of the house just about every establishment with televisions will be showing these matches. The NYTimes.com, who constantly kills it when it comes to interactive features, has various ways of visualizing stats from the matches and for those in the five boroughs and interactive map showing where to go to watch your team.

Finally, there are so many videos online of the goals that the real challenge is trying to watch them before they’re removed because of copyright issues. With that said, here’s a video of the first goal of the tournament and arguably the best so far by Siphiwe Tshabalala of South Africa.

Also highly recommended are The Guardian UK’s Daily World Cup Podcast and US Soccer Fan Doug Zimmerman’s Photoblog from South Africa. However, not highly recommended is the irritating vuvuzella iphone app which seems (if walking around my neighborhood is any indication) to be getting downloaded way too often. Enjoy The Cup!

posted by setzen in Just Plain Interesting | 1 Comment »
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