Are You Ready For The World Cup ?
Counting down... two more days before the start of World Cup 2006! I知 sure there will be a big opening ceremony for the most watched event in the world. I知 not a big fan of football, but in the past, I had created a non-official website for World Cup 2002, and my company was behind an official football event in 2004, a website, press, advertising, etc... It was very stressful, and I also seemed to be in the press room at the stadium, or working from my office, so I never had time to see a single match.
In 2002, I was very impressed by the work of Yahoo! in the World Cup. Overall, it was successful even though management of such a website isn't easy at all. You can imagine how a little error in entering live information could be fatal and took hours sometimes before it could be fixed. In the background, generating static HTML was a very good strategy to support the very high traffic that the website was generating, a technique used still today.
For the World Cup when we say high traffic, it's really high... but it will not cause Internet Meltdown as some newspapers are predicting. Certainly the majority of the audience around the globe will be in front of their television, but there is also a very important audience from internet.
At PHPMagazine.net we have setup a map of the World Cup 2006 stadiums using Google maps, and with the satellite view you can travel to each stadium and see it really close! I'm not sure if Google will update the maps during the event, but I'm sure that during this World Cup we'll update that interface and will show the latest information about matches. Feature coming in two days!
