World Cup KickOff
World Cup KickOff is one of my most successful Web projects of my entire career.
The idea came about in 2006 when a new technique in web development surfaced called Microformats.
The fundamental concept to Microformats is to discover and standardise common patterns in HTML, for example, representing calendar events or contact details. Once the data is marked up against a standard specification, it is easily accessible for transformation into other data services, such as Brian Suda’s X2V service.
This got me thinking - if I could apply the hCalendar specification to sport fixtures, it would be possible to import all those fixtures in to my personal organiser, such as Outlook, iCal or a mobile device.
With the World Cup fast approaching, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to test the concept, both from a technical mindset and with respect of public demand.
It turned out I had hit on something special. Not only were the web developer community lapping up the concept but the general public were interested too!
Media empires like Yahoo! and The Guardian were linking to the website while computer magazines like .net and Practical Web Design were even publishing World Cup KickOff as a great example of Microformats in the wild.
After the success of World Cup KickOff, it seemed only necessary to create several spin-off projects using the same concept but in different tournaments: have a look at Euro KickOff for the UEFA European Championships and Six Nations KickOff for the RBS 6 Nations rugby tournament.
