The Beautiful Game

Football is a hugely discussed subject online - I recently saw a post regarding the shortlist for the Football Fanzine Awards for the best blog - the entries included:Aston Villa AVFC Blog Celtic Celtic Quick news Fulham Craven Cottage Newsround General The 100 Football Grounds Club Liverpool Kop Blog QPR QPR Report Rangers Fat Eck Sunderland Sobs on Soccer Watford BHaPPY Fanzine Awards

I was also amazed at the success of http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk/ where they now have 35k owners who have paid £35 for their stake in the club and they get to have a say in everything from kit suppliers to the team selection - they have got to the final of the FA Trophy on 10th May.

When you have a look at these sites there is hugely engaging, interesting and amusing content so it even more interesting that a football network site http://www.oleole.com/ is coming out of beta and launching in early May - the aim is to create a Global Football Community allowing fans to communicate with other like-minded fans. It allows you to create your own custom profile, join or create a fan group, discuss all the latest news and gossip, blog about everything from controversial calls to players to favorite stadiums and more, or manage your own football team with their unique European Super League fantasy football game!

As a social network I guess they rely on getting people to the site as well as ongoing interaction but judging by the content and the passion displayed by those already using it I think it will only be a matter of time before they place themselves well and truly at the centre of all things football.

http://www.oleole.com/

Social media aggregator

I came across this great site from Guy Kawasaki http://alltop.com/ which helps you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. These collections are aggregated into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports and politics which are updated every 10 minutes. At each Alltop site they display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — they call this “single-page aggregation.”
They claim to have created the “digital magazine rack” of the Internet where they create starting points not destinations to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

They have a goal of the “cessation of Internet stagnation” which seems like a lofty intent but I think it works very well and goes a long way to start helping people through the quagmire of subject related sites on the net - this is especially relevant if like me you do not focus only on the feeds you have in your reader, but you want to read something different it is perfect.

Avatar me up !

People have talked about avatars for a while now but have never seen a simple and fun way to create your own until I came across voki which allows you to not only pick from a number of templates but also full customise every aspect of the image from facial hair to background to accompanying "bling" and you can even add a voice / song audio - you can then post the results of your efforts to any blog or a number of social networks. If you look at their blog people have created avators for a variety of people from Barrack Obama to Alicia Keys and there are multiple other applications.

The site is hugely popular and has been nominated for the South by Southwest Web Awards - have a play with it - I did - the results are featured to the right of this post - I just wonder if the Second Life effect applies here ie I read that although 70 odd % of users are men 70 odd % of avatars are female - go figure as they says in the US!

When User Generated Content Attacks

Lots of time has passed since the last post but I guess as things get busy prioritisations have to be made and the Blog suffers - this should not be the case - anyway - I was prompted to get writing again by this article - When User Generated Content Attacks ! which I found incredibly entertaining. Now many of these stories have been recounted before but when it all sits together it is clear that many companies embark on UGC activity without any real thought as to the consequences and the fact that by definition it does leave a brand open to abuse. The story I like especially is Nike's bespoke trainer campaign - I cannot believe that a behemoth such as Nike don't think that this sort of dialogue will not be shared with with the blogoshphere and as result do more harm than good !