I missed this story. Really. It was published at November 28, 2005.

I found this old article from Cnet reporting that after diminished the sponsorship contract with Vodafone the club has started sponsorship talk with some technology giants.

Excerpt from the article:

Manchester United is in talks with a number of global high-tech giants, including Google, about replacing Vodafone as its shirt sponsor, according to reports.

The paper, citing sources in London’s financial center, said the Vodafone brand is not well-known in the U.S. and the termination of the deal gives the Glazer family the opportunity to bag a bigger global brand that will help give Manchester United a higher profile in America.

Two of the nontech brands believed to be in talks with the soccer club are Coca-Cola and Levi Strauss.

Given Google’s high reputation in Open Source communities and it is now the biggest internet company in the world, i was wonder how big ManUtd can be now in terms of the internet presence. And, we, bloggers who blog about The Red Devils must be… um… much more bigger thing than now. Um… maybe.

But i’ll be super glad if Google sponsoring the club.

This is useful for those who:

1. Will blog about European Championship next month.
2. Blog about Football using Wordpress.

There’s a Wordpress plugin name WP-Championship, which is a plugin for letting you play a guessing game of a tournament or championship e.g. soccer.

Some features:

1. Define number of groups, and points given to the winner, looser
2. of each match
3. Define teams and a team specific icon
4. Define matches finalround and pre-final round
5. For each user you can set a substitute
6. Sends mails about current game status (if wanted)
7. Define game admin to edit match results
8. Shows some stats for admin and users
9. Sql for the EM2008 championship in sitzerland and austria

This may sounds dumb but i haven’t try it. Why?

1. I am not going to watch Euro 2008. No England team, no use to watch Euro.
2. The plugin homepage is written in German. I don’t understand.

However, if you see the features, this plugin can be useful to gain community and readership for your football blog right?

So here’s the download link, and here’s the plugin homepage.

Via Wordpress Plugin Database.

This is my 3rd time this season that I miss the LIVE game. Today’s reason is the most retarded among others, the government blocked my cable TV provider since last Friday so there’s no way I can watch tonight’s game.

However this post is not intend to show how pity I am so heck, I follow live text report from BBC so in fact I follow the game LIVE. If you’ve never follow a game via live text, let me tell you how it feels. It feels awful. Simply because you can’t see what’s going on visually and because of that, you will always expect the unexpected every time the page refreshes. But, ever since I use Twitter, this time I don’t feel like I am a retard by following live text report.

Anyhow, from what I read, seems like we’re a bit shaky in the first 20 minutes of the game and Arsenal had 57% of the the ball possession. But dude, we ended it with style by fighting back the gooners and take full points.

I’ll go straight to the most important things, the goals:

47:22 GOAL - Emmanuel Adebayor
Man Utd 0 - Arsenal 1

51:13 GOAL - Cristiano Ronaldo
Man Utd 1 - Arsenal 1

70:03 GOAL - Owen Hargreaves
Man Utd 2 - Arsenal 1

This is to be likely ended Gooners title hopes as we now lead them 9 points and there’s only 4 games left. Come on, we’re not going to lose that much are we? Let’s just hope we don’t.

Come on you Reds!!

Note to sports media: Prepare for Mr. Wenger’s moaning.

Note to BBC: i think you guys should give coveritlive.com or other similar service a try. Your live text report is so 90’s! But thanks!

I check website traffics for my own blog and my client sites. I see a cool traffic rise to Red Conspiracy lately, mostly came from Search Engine. What happen?

Well. Ever since i move this blog to Wordpress from Blogger, almost every thing went great (except for the consistent outage from cheap host i’m using). Wordpress has given me the space to customize almost everything on this site, which are the features that i found it impossible to do in Blogger.

Other than keep this blog content updated, i did some tweak to optimize the blog structure to meet a better Search Engine Optimization standards. I’ve change several sets on the blog’s meta keywords and this morning i found out that this blog has improve its ranking on search engines.

1. Google

Google is the biggest search engine in the world. In terms of Manchester United Blog keyword, i found Reds Conspiracy now has a place in the first page of search results of Google.com (USA). Then in Google UK, it’s also in the first page, as well as in Google Indonesia.

2. Yahoo!

In Yahoo! search result, this blog placed 2nd on search result on term of Manchester United Blog.

3. AskThis blog is also appear in the first page of Ask.com search result.

4. Google Blog Search

In terms of ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Manchester United Blog’, this blog is not on the search result, it’s in RELATED BLOG at the top of search result!!!

Eventhough this blog is quite young (6 months old), gets a lot of link exchange rejections from older blogs, and those which ranks higher are all high quality and senior blogs that blogged from the great Manchester area (i envy you!). So i think by far Red Conspiracy, that manage and maintain a rookie blogger from Bali-Indonesia has done a good job to be appear in search engine result pages.

In Manchester United news, i suppose the scousers could expect hostile reception from OT fanatics. We’re counting on your direct support for the lads, we need the win so much.Come on you Reds!

PS: You can contact me if you need to improve your blog (any blog in any niche) on Search Engine rankings.

Yeah, if you don’t have cable TV then it’s the chance to watch EPL game online. Joost.com provide it, but not LIVE games.

From their page:

Full edited coverage of the Barclays Premier League. With access to every Barclays Premier League match plus weekly roundups, top 5 goals, top 5 saves, team of the week, player of the week and archive footage from the past 15 seasons of the World’s greatest league.

Not bad, so i tried to click its link to watch one of games provided, booooom, apparently the service is not available for my country (yesterday, it was Hulu.com that i found retarded). Ah! Joost is retarded. But no problem, i have cable TV so i can never miss any LIVE game.

If you want to check it out, well you will need a fast internet connection, you can head to Joost.com. If your country is eligible, then you can try it out.

PS: No link for you Joost.

I’m always been a fan of Soccerlens, but the site is not a specific Manchester United Fan/News site. In sites like ManUtdPies (use its own domain manutdpies.tv) or TheOffSide (use subdomains like manu.theoffside.com), you can pick your own favorite club news to subscribe.

Of course general football news is a wide range of topic to cover but heck i don’t really care that much about ‘football’ and other teams to fill my feed reader. So i was wonder how to choose my subscription option to the cool Football news site.

Well, what i just did was finding the tag. In Wordpress blogs, every tag has its own feed. After finding the tag i wanted, any articles tagged as Manchester United, i added a word ‘feed’. For example the tag structure at Soccerlens look like this (find it by right click the tag link and ‘Copy Link Location’):

http://soccerlens.com/tags/teams/manchester-united/

Then my favorite feed address would be:

http://soccerlens.com/tags/teams/manchester-united/feed

Add that link to your feed reader. That’s it. You are now subscribed to Soccerlens’ news specifically about Manchester United.

The Official Site is the source to all Manchester United fans around the world. It is a super cool website in terms of interactivity and usability for users. But do you know that back then manutd.com was not that good? It developed, of course, Manchester United is a worldwide brand, and of course the internet is the fastest way to reach millions of global audiences.

It’s cool to remember the old thing. EPL Talk has more.

Got this from compete.com.

Another analytics result which shown that Manchester United’s official site is the most famous and has more traffic than the other Big 4 official site at the Premier League. This analytics shown people count to the 4 official sites. Compete triangulates multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel & Toolbar to estimate U.S. traffic.

Permanent link to this analytics is here. You can analyze from different point of view to make comparisons to the big 4 official sites.

Manchester United is better than everyone.

This is a cool new feature from Google Maps. You can embed important place to your blog or send it to your friends by email.

Below is the map to the theater of dreams (pointed by the green arrow), where the best football club in the world live.

View Larger Map