Now everyone knows that people in the Portland metropolitan area love the soccer. You know, the whole futbol thing? Timbers Army and whatnot? And we all know that the greater Portland area is big into the whole blogging thing.
But did you know that Portland’s neighbor to the north—Vancouver, Washington—combines that love of soccer and love of blogging? And that in so doing, it’s the home of the largest English-language World Cup soccer blog—thanks to the folks at Vancouver-based BootsNAll Travel Network.
Started in 2002 on a whim, the site re-emerged in 2006 to cover the competition in Germany.
After a few years off, World Cup Blog returned in time to cover the 2006 World Cup in Germany. It was revamped to include a blog for each of the 32 teams in the tournament, as well as one about the referees and and another for general tournament news.
The blogs were written by fans in countries all over the world including: United States, United Kingdom, Indonesia, Hungary, Sweden and Brazil. The bloggers were not paid journalists, but they are fans that offer their passion and opinions about their teams on a daily basis.
For 2010, the World Cup blog now features a writer for every team in the tournament as well as four full-time writers and two writers on hand in South Africa for this years competition.
And if there any doubt as to the popularity of the sport? The site garnered a server-melting 16 million page views during the World Cup in 2006. That sort of traffic inspired the folks to buff up the backend—moving their server structure to the cloud for immediate scalability—in preparation for the World Cup games starting this week.
Of course, soccer is all about the fans. And their interactions. So the World Cup blog looks to facilitate fan discussions with both live blogging and comments. And their Disqus implementation allows fans to share their comments with their favorite social networks, as well.
For more information, tune into the World Cup blog. Or visit BootsNAll Travel Network. For more on the tournament itself, visit the official FIFA World Cup site.
(Image courtesy isakaronsson. Used under Creative Commons.)
