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World Cup Blogging

Adidas Teamgeist World Cup 2006 official ball

Not surprisingly, as in 2002, there are plenty of blogs that are dedicated to following World Cup 2006 in Germany. My RSS reader is reaching breaking point. At this point, I’m in danger of spending more time reading about the World Cup than watching it. (Note: If you’re still not hip to RSS and newsfeeds, then this is as good a time as any to get up to speed. I find it mildly scandalous that there are still major media outlets without feeds or with poorly-implemented feeds.)

Here is what surely is a partial list of World Cup 2006 blogs to get you started:

Independent blogs

SoccerBlog.com (feed) — A good, general soccer blog that needless to say will be almost exclusively focused on the World Cup for the time-being.

Soccer Shout Podcast (podcast feed) — A podcast focused (for the next month anyway) on the World Cup.

World Cup 2006 News (feed) — A blog maintained by a 21-year old German.

World Cup Blog (feed) — The World Cup blog to end all World Cup blogs. There’s one main blog (linked above), and 32 accompanying blogs, one for each country participating (feeds here). There’s even a separate blog for the referrees!

World Cup Blog (feed) — Not to be confused with the uber-blog with the same creative name above, this is still a decent, often-updated blog from the UK (which means we can probably expect a heavy England focus).

World Cup Hippo (feed) — Blog focused mainly on England, as far as I can tell.

Mainstream media blogs

ABC: Der Blog (feed) — Blog from Stuart Watt of Australia’s ABC (not the American network). No doubt he’ll be focusing on the “Socceroos” of Australia. There’s also a podcast available.

About.com: World Soccer (feed) — Is About.com mainstream? At any rate, “guide” Bill Hutchison is traveling to Germany and therefore his daily updated site should be all things World Cup for the next month or so.

Active.com: World Cup 2006 (feed) — A group blog brought to us by Puma. A nice array of bloggers on call.

BBC World Cup 2006 Blog (feed) — 14 different authors working the World Cup in various capacities for the BBC share thoughts, insight, and gossip about the tournament.

Fox Sports: Jamie Trecker’s Blog — Blog from Fox Sports’ soccer writer Trecker, Fox being one of the few US networks committed to soccer.

Guardian Unlimited: World Cup Blog (feed) — Guardian scribes pen commentary from Germany. The “web feed” link on their page is still incorrect. Use the link here instead.

International Herald Tribune: The Beautiful Game — IHT’s Roger Cohen will be posting longer pieces during WC ’06. No feed though.

International Herald Tribune: From the Fans — IHT’s second World Cup-related blog is written by fans. IHT is still seeking participants for this new blog.

New York Times: World Cup ’06 (feed) — U.S. mainstream media gets in on the act with this well-written (and linked up) blog from the NY Times.

Spiegel Online (English) — Blog from the international version of Spiegel Online. Hallelujah! You have to click on each day’s listing from this page, and there you’ll find several entries per day. No RSS feed, sadly.

Telegraph Blogs: David Bond (feed) — Telegraph scribe Bond is reporting from the England camp while they’re in Germany. Expect a lot of Rooney-related posts in the coming days (yawn).

USA Today: Soccer Sweep (feed) — A somewhat anemic blog (with an awful title to boot) from USA Today, perhaps not surprising given that its two authors will be blogging from the World Cup hotbed of Virginia!

Washington Post: Road to the World Cup (feed) — Joe DeNunzio (with support from Jason La Canfora) are in Germany, doing their best to reverse American apathy towards the beautiful game. Apparently only intended to exist pre-World Cup (huh?), its run has now been graciously extended by the Post’s editors.

Player blogs

CBS Sportsline: Kasey Keller — US goalkeeper Keller is posting weekly updates from Germany. (Beware, the rest of the Sportsline site crashes my Firefox browser).

MSN Road to the World Cup: Player Diaries (see each diary for the feed) — Six sporadically updated blogs from star players at the World Cup, including Michael Owen and Ronaldinho, and one blog from Kevin Kuranyi, who was left off Jurgen Klinsmann’s German squad. If he keeps at it, I’d say Kuranyi’s blog will be the one to read from this bunch.

Other news coverage

There are naturally quite a few media outlets running special World Cup coverage that, while not blogs, deserve mention and reading if you want to keep up on every metatarsal and minutiae of the proceedings:

BBC Sports (feed)

ESPNsoccernet (feed) — Too bad their RSS feeds are all screwed up. They seem to have fixed their newsfeed now.

FIFAworldcup.com (feed) — The official site, done with Yahoo!. Available in eight other languages besides English. Plenty to sate one’s appetite.

Fox Sports (feed)

Guardian (feed) — There’s even a podcast.

National Public Radio (feed) — Even Frank Deford is writing about soccer positively.

Reuters — Decent coverage, but I defy you to find a link to this section on Reuters’ home page. Not to mention no dedicated feed. Give the not-updated-in-over-a-week “blogs” a miss too.

Spiegel — Check out their “interactive guide” for just about everything you need to know, all in one handy and easy-to-navigate package.

Washington Post

Wikipedia — Everything you need to know, all on one page.

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Japanese women’s attitudes to beauty

Following up on a survey I found via What Japan Thinks related to Asian women’s attitudes to beauty, I found a larger survey conducted in 2004, The Real Truth About Beauty (.pdf file, 48 pages), that looked at perceptions of what beauty means among 10 countries, Japan being one of them (and the only Asian country represented). Both surveys were commisioned by Dove (Unilever), which has in the last couple of years built a successful ad and marketing campaign based on challenging received notions of beauty among women. While it’s easy to be cynical about a study commissioned by a for-profit company, the surveys make for fascinating reading, and for this reader, give valuable insights into how Japanese women perceive themselves, and also how they view the media environment in which they live.

Continue reading “Japanese women’s attitudes to beauty”

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World Cup 2006 on TV

I’ve suddenly found myself to be a huge soccer fan (yeah I know, only us Yanks — and the Japanese — call it soccer, despite the British English etymological origins of the word), and thus very excited about the upcoming World Cup 2006 in Germany.

I couldn’t care less that the US is in it, nor for that matter Japan, although given that I view both as underdogs, I’ll probably be rooting for them (as I will be for all the African teams, and tiny Trinidad and Tobago). I just want to watch the matches, and as many of them as I can. Fortunately I have access to the two NHK satellite channels, including the high-def BShi (which even on the cheap analog that I have looks amazing), as they will be showing all games live. Not only that, but because of the time difference between here and Germany, all games will be on TV after I come home from work (most games will be shown at 10pm, 1am, or 4am), which was not the case in 2002. Granted, some of these games are at 4 a.m., but still. Not sure what the sub-channel audio situation will be, though in 2002 many if not most broadcasts featured English on the second audio channel, so I’m crossing my fingers for that.

Mind you, I’ll listen to the Japanese, it’s not a problem, though if Japanese is the only option for the matches featuring Team Japan, I’ll probably employ the mute button — there are few worse things to listen to than completely biased Japanese commentators (except of course, completely biased American commentators!).

At any rate, mostly for myself, I’ve compiled a TV guide of the Group Stage matches as they are shown here in Japan. I’ve uploaded it (excuse the down and dirty html site) in case there are others living here in Japan who might find it useful:

World Cup 2006 Group Stage Japan TV Schedule

It’s only the Group Stage matches at this point (in brief, there are 8 groups of 4 teams each, teams play other teams in their group, the top two teams advance to the final 16). I will probably create a second guide for the “knockout stages” later when those teams are determined.

UPDATE (June 7, 2006): I’ve added a broadcast schedule of “Daily Highlights” and “Weekly Highlights” programs.

UPDATE (June 23, 2006): I’ve now added the Japan TV broadcast schedule for the Knockout Stage which begins Saturday night (technically Sunday morning at 12:00 a.m.). Not all the names are filled in of course, but I’ll update it as we go along.