Everywhere you look online nowadays, there’s a new social network for a certain niche. Whether its for photographers, music lovers, dads, mums or even children - you are bound to find a website that you will feel comfortable with.

So when I got an invite to Footbo - a social network for football fans - my natural reaction was to sign up and see what it was all about.

The bullet points on the homepage sum it up quite well…

• Connect with your friends & other football fans from around the world
• Receive live scores, fixtures and personalized news
• Blog about your insights and emotions
• Predict games and challenge your friends in prediction leagues
• Read-up on and contribute to your favorite teams and players

The website relies quite heavily on user-generated content. If there are teams or players missing from the system, you just add them. It’s an interesting concept to get around the legal wranglings of the Football DataCo with their rules about publishing football data. Who owns the content? The user or Footbo? It would be interesting to see what happens when the 2008-9 season starts and the scores and fixtures become heavily used.

I also like how there are sections dedicated to leagues and teams, with content feeding in from other news sources and YouTube for videos (although with the current lawsuit between The FA and YouTube, I’m not sure how long that will last).

While the user interface is fairly intuitive, I have found the occasional “feature” that could do with some extra attention in terms of usability. For example, some of the consoles on your user page such as the friend and group requests could have worked better with some AJAX calls rather than entire page loads.

Only time will tell whether Footbo will survive in a social world dominated by MySpace, Facebook and Bebo but I seriously think with some good publicity in the right audiences, Footbo can really appeal to the commercial market of football. Football is one of the most valuable markets in the World with some of the strongest and most passionate communities you shall ever find. If that passion can be transferred to the Internet, and specifically to Footbo, there could be a real opportunity for Footbo to work.

Not exactly the headline you’d want to see on a night when England had to deliver just a draw against group leaders Croatia.

But it was a dismal performance from our lads in white while the Croatians out-played, out-performed, out-classed us at Wembley tonight.

So where does this leave English football? What does it mean for Mr McLaren? What the hell are all the hooligans going to do next Summer while the rest of the continent enjoy watching their teams in Austria and Switzerland? More importantly, what does this mean for the follow-up to World Cup KickOff? Should I bother spending time developing a website that I wouldn’t even use myself?

Lots of questions and not many answers. It’s a time to reflect on the so-called Beautiful Game and what it means for “Engerland”. It’s the first time England haven’t been in a huge football tournament in 14 years (think back to World Cup USA in 1994) so maybe it’s time to give the team a chance to sort themselves out.

Commiseration blog post is over. Well done for trying England but it wasn’t looking likely from the start was it?

Update: I’ve just been invited to take part in a Football Fans Census survey regarding the England team. It might be worth sending your opinions as well.

It is now!

That was yet another World Cup that saw England get knocked out on penalties, more corruption than the British Government and even more dirty players than you could wave a stick at.

I’m not going to spend the next couple of paragraphs whinging about the poor performance on England’s part nor the whole Cheeky Winker campaign against that Portugese boy (who I’ve never liked anyway - especially his fancy footwork!). Instead, I just would like to highlight the one good thing to come out of this year’s World Cup - the coverage.

Ever since going to university, I’ve always had a problem with the whole TV Licence thing. I understand that the BBC need to gain funding for their services from somewhere and I am willing to part with some cash to keep a National Treasure from going commercial. My main issue is paying for all those poor quality programmes such as unneccessary amounts of fly-on-the-wall documentaries or reality TV programmes - programmes I really don’t have the time of day for.

It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve started enjoying BBC One’s drama efforts when Life on Mars was launched (starring one of my favourite actors, John Simm, from one of my favourite ever movies, Human Traffic) and David Tennant doing Doctor Who with Billie Piper (finally - quality Saturday night TV).

The one area the BBC have always got right is it’s online presence. Ever since its early days, the BBC have offered top quality content in news and entertainment and bearly a day goes by when I don’t visit the BBC website for something or other. This Summer, the BBC went that one step further and put all the World Cup games they were broadcasting online, alongside their normal TV and radio coverage. It was a great gesture for all those who couldn’t get home from work to watch matches. All this came free too!

You might say “Yeah, but TV over the Internet is nothing new!” - true, but I think you’ll struggle to find good quality television available for free online. Most IPTV packages are Paid For services, either subscription or Pay-Per-View, and are rarely of the quality that you’ll find from one of the original TV broadcasters in the world. The BBC have won numerous awards for their broadcasting (normally when it comes to their Natural History selection) but I think you’ll find most sports fans will always give the BBC their vote when it comes to sports coverage. Whether its football, athletics or a marathon - the BBC are there with their top-notch cameramen and A-List presenters to make the experience the best on the box. The proof is in the pudding when, yesterday, the BBC peaked with a 60.8% share of TV ratings (that’s 17 million viewers) against ITV’s measly 12.5% (3.5million) according to the Guardian’s Daily Ratings.

While it was a generally disappointing World Cup in terms of performance in all teams, the Beeb proved that it takes more than good football to make a tournament entertaining. Role on Euro 2008.

With The Championship well under way with new teams and new players, it seemed only fitting to give the Super Rams site a new look for the 2005/6 season.

I didn’t want to go for an over the top look like the previous design - I wanted to give the site a nice and easy look which accomodated for the entire screen rather than a fixed 600px width. I kept the original colour theme as it fits with the team’s colours and they are still colours that aren’t really used much on the Web. I also wanted to upgrade the backend system as the previous site was working on WordPress 1.0, rather than the latest 1.5 release.

Anyway, its not a huge announcement but it certainly is significant in my opinion. Last season, I wasn’t very good at keeping the content up-to-date so I intend to do Derby proud and dedicate more time to the team and the site this year.