麻豆社 Sport played its part on Wednesday 9 February. There was a two-hour session in London, the first hour of which discussed sport and social media, with the second hour focusing in on the .

producer opened the batting (that was his line, by the way!) in the first hour, discussing the way the TMS team used social media during the recent . was next up, followed by the first social media London derby as Arsenal and Chelsea new media leads battled it out for the approval of an industry audience.

In the second hour, the , was kind enough to chair a session which featured , former world swimming champion and current 麻豆社 5 Live pundit Karen Pickering, Beijing Olympics 100m finalist and 2012 hopeful Jeanette Kwakye and myself as 麻豆社 Sport website editor and social media lead.

It was very well-received by those in the audience and . The hashtag #smwldn_sport trended in the London area on the night and there was lots of discussion about the event on Twitter.

If you missed it, you can . Adam is first up, and then later, the 麻豆社-hosted session is at 1hr 8m 30s.

If you have any questions about the way 麻豆社 Sport uses social media you can leave comments on this blog or tweet me anytime .

We think users of the Sport site will be interested in his blog, because a lot of you also use our News site, and also because we are starting work on our plans to relaunch the Sport site.

It won't be exactly like the new News site, but the post does offer some insight into the direction we are heading in, as far as some aspects and features of the website go.

This press release has just been sent out by 麻豆社 Sport.

It announces the TV viewing figures for yesterday's and also mentions that yesterday the 麻豆社 Sport website had the highest number of visitors of any day in our 10-year history. In fact the top three days for visitors to our website have been the last three days - Wednesday, Monday, Tuesday in that order.

I hope you are enjoying our coverage of the and on this website - I'd be delighted to get your feedback and will answer any questions about the website's coverage of these two major sporting events on the 麻豆社.

麻豆社 Sport's coverage of England's crucial decider against Slovenia drew a peak figure of 15.4m with an 81% audience share - the highest daytime audience of the tournament so far. The game averaged 12.9m viewers and a 78.2% audience share.

麻豆社 Sport Online also saw record numbers to the site with 6m unique users, easily surpassing the previous record of 4.7m - set on Monday 21 June.

Another record was beaten with 1.5m users of AV on the site, beating the 1.2m achieved during last year's Wimbledon match between Andy Murray and Andy Roddick.

An additional 500,000 requests came from fans watching the match live in 麻豆社 iPlayer. The game will be available for the next seven days.

England's game against Germany will be shown live on 麻豆社1 on Sunday 27 June from 1400 BST (kick-off at 1500 BST) and will also be available to UK users on the 麻豆社 Sport website and 麻豆社 iPlayer.

Lewis Wiltshire is the Editor of the 麻豆社 Sport website. He tweets about the 麻豆社 Sport site and answers questions about it on .

We publicly launched on 11 May - as we marked one month to go until the tournament - and my how that month has flown.

I will try to explain here, with two days to go until that first game between hosts , what our offering on this website will be during the World Cup - what's already there and what you can still expect to see.

The video archive in particular has been very well received. We have tried to present this , , and via , who has covered every World Cup since 1970 and interviewed every England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey.

We hope you have enjoyed with apologies to our users outside the UK, who are not permitted to watch it on our site under the terms of our World Cup contract.

Once the tournament starts, we will have live video in the UK of every game that's on 麻豆社 television, and highlights of both our own games and those on ITV. The games that are live on ITV television will be streamed .

It sounds really simplistic, but one of our main aims was simply to let everyone know what was coming up, when it was coming up, and how you could follow it. Hopefully we do that via , our which lets you see how the tournament will unfold, and our , which explains what you will find on the 麻豆社 and who our key presenters and pundits will be.

Which brings me to the use of those big names on the website. I have mentioned , but we will also be getting access to some of the experts whose views will be seen and heard across 麻豆社 TV and radio this summer.

, and will be on our TV sofa and also appearing on this site, along with our regulars such as , , , and . Everton manager has joined the likes of and in the commentary booths, and we will also be bringing their views to this site too.

In addition, there will be blogs from in-house talent like Football Focus presenter , our Sports Editor , sports news correspondents and , and web journalists , , and .

If you use social media, there's more to be found there. On Twitter we have a list of tweeters whose contributions are also being displayed on the right-hand side of our World Cup homepage. .

And if you use Facebook, and you can also , getting updates throughout the World Cup and also during the domestic Premier League season about the most popular TV football show in the country.

I haven't mentioned our usual service of live text commentary, live data, match previews and reports. The hugely popular text commentary service will be provided by two journalists in South Africa (Jonathan Stevenson in Johannesburg and Chris Bevan in Cape Town) as well as others back in London.

We have completely rebuilt the live match page which these commentaries sit in, and some of you will have seen the public try-outs we gave this new service recently. We will run another full, public test of this service on Thursday, and then we'll be into Friday's action.

Match reports will be written both in South Africa (by those two guys, plus Phil McNulty and Paul Fletcher) and also from London. And we'll have photo galleries every day, plus don't forget our where we are aiming to get the players taking part in the tournament pictured with members of our audience. Have you had your picture taken with a World Cup footballer? Send it to us via that page.

Finally, have you tried our ? This tool allows you to follow a team through the tournament, getting updates, reports and video highlights (if you're in the UK) and also you can work out who is going to win the greatest footballing prize of all by predicting the winners at every stage. Please do try it out and send it round to your friends too!

I am happy, as always, to answer any queries here about our World Cup coverage here on this blog and you can also where I answer queries about the 麻豆社 Sport website on a daily basis. I will be in London for the tournament, but our web editor in South Africa, .

Enjoy the greatest show on the footballing earth, everyone ...

This year that changed slightly - and yet we still have the and finales to come.

But that major tournament is looming, with the opener between and Mexico just 18 days away. For the 麻豆社 Sport website and our partners who deliver the technology behind the site, 11 June will be the culmination of many months of incredibly hard work. Our World Cup website launched on 11 May as we marked a month to go until the tournament started (all right, for the eagle-eyed it launched with a month-and-a-day to go but we wanted to be ready for the 11th!) and there is still more to come.

The biggest of the still-to-comes, of course, will be the way we present our live coverage of the actual games. This will bring together the three most important aspects of following a match online - live video, , and live data - but in a more compelling way than we have done for any previous event.

We are also pretty excited about , and the introduction of a . John has already made a fantastic start in bringing this website's audience a glimpse into his extraordinary reservoir of memories and knowledge - this is a man who has worked at every World Cup and interviewed every England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey.

As well as Motty, we will be giving users of the website a chance to experience the World Cup through the eyes of our rich pool of 麻豆社 TV and presenters and pundits. There's a 麻豆社 bus touring , reflecting the culture and flavour of the nation hosting Africa's first World Cup, . And the website will be making continued use of the world-class journalism produced by the 麻豆社's sports news department, with the likes of and reporters and in South Africa to blog or to bring you constantly breaking news and analysis.

All of which is a brief taste of what we're planning to offer during the World Cup. There will be another blog nearer to the start of the tournament from us, outlining the .

But hopefully it also gives a pointer towards the way that the editorial content on the website is constantly appraised and at times shaken up. For the World Cup, a lighthearted take on proceedings will be available from comedian , who is presenting an alternative view called 'How to Watch Football'. , and also , will both have shows on 5 Live which will be available as podcasts, and will provide alternative commentaries on selected World Cup matches.

Some of the other humorous elements of this site - , the blog and - will not be returning, as we continue to keep reviewing our editorial output. As part of that process, the will be closing. We think that rather than house all of our light-hearted content in one place, this should be present throughout the site, whether it's the live text commentaries we produce, a Mark Watson video series or something else.

I would actually just like to pay tribute to 'Robbo' Robson for all he's done for 麻豆社 Sport. He's been telling it like it is on this website for nine years now - and while he's moving on, he will . Thanks for everything Robbo - and good luck.

I will be happy to discuss any aspect of the website content here, but a reminder also that I am on call anytime for feedback on our site .

Not that the organising commitee are letting a lack of the white stuff worry them. Their planning continues apace and in our own way, so does ours as the 麻豆社 prepares to cover the , which takes place 12-28 February in Vancouver, for the 14th time.

So what can you expect from us? Well, is eight hours behind GMT, so if you are watching in the UK, your live TV coverage will start most evenings at around 7pm and continue through to the early morning UK time. ().

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Viewers with digital TV can access up to six additional streams of coverage to see extended coverage of the 86 individual events. In addition the 麻豆社 Red Button will carry a 30-minute Highlights show - available everyday from 0600 - encapsulating all the day's action.

There will be a catch up show every lunchtime on 麻豆社 Two featuring the best of the overnight action.

The television coverage will be presented by Sue Barker, Hazel Irvine and Clare Balding - the last of whom will be based mainly at , the venue for alpine and nordic events two hours north of Vancouver itself, and the site of furious snow stockpiling of late.

(By the way, if you would like more background on the mild weather in British Columbia my colleague Jonny Bramley, the executive producer for our TV coverage, is already in Canada and which is worth reading if only because Jonny namechecks a weather system brilliantly named the Pineapple Express.)

Olympic gold medallist Sir Matthew Pinsent and Lizzie Greenwood Hughes will be reporting on TV and also writing blogs and appearing on the website. Matthew is actually carrying the Olympic torch this Friday, one week before the start of the Games, and we're hoping he will blog about that afterwards.

Also on TV - Graham Bell and Matt Chilton along with Kerrin Lee-Gartner (Canada's 1992 Women's Downhill gold medallist) will guide the viewers through the alpine skiing events; Ed Leigh will be on hand for snowboarding and freestyle skiing; Paul Dickenson and Colin Bryce will follow Team GB's hopefuls in the sliding events, while Paul will also cover ski jumping; Hugh Porter and Wilf O'Reilly will be rink-side for speed skating; British skating icon Robin Cousins (celebrating 30 years since his gold medal on the ice at Lake Placid) covers figure skating with Sue; Steve Cram and Rhona Martin, like Pinsent an Olympic gold medallist, will cover curling; Rob Walker will cover biathlon, nordic combined and cross country; and Bob Ballard and Brent Pope follow the ice hockey.

As for the website, the area I am responsible for, we launched the first version of our Winter Olympics homepage late last year and the full launch is scheduled for 9 February.

We will have biography pages for every athlete competing at the Games. These will tell you who someone is, which sport they compete in, and basic details like height, weight, age and home town. But for the members of and some of the bigger international stars, we'll have much more information and colour, in text and video, as we bring to life the characters you will see on your screens over the next few weeks.

We will also have guides to the sports, just in case you need a tiny bit more background on the techniques used by, say, Shelley Rudman who won an unexpected silver at the last Winter Olympics four years ago in Turin.

Shelley Rudman is one of Team GB's medal hopes

When the Games start we will of course have medals tables, results and schedules pages, and our popular live text commentaries will be produced from Vancouver's International Broadcast Centre, bringing the local colour and flavour of the Games, as well as the latest news, direct to your PC or mobile phone.

The website will have live video for our UK users, and you will be able to select from a choice of sports via our multiscreen, which of course will also be available on the red button on your TV.

If you are not able to watch live because of the time difference you will be able to watch, on our website, a video clip of every gold medal being won, and also the best Team GB moments (whether they feature a medal or not!). Some of this video will be available on our mobile site.

If you want to whet your appetite for that video content you can enjoy, right now, classic moments from our Winter Olympics archive. Eddie the Eagle? Torvill and Dean? Enjoy!

In terms of reporters, as well as Matthew and Lizzie, we'll have blogs and tweets from the 麻豆社 Sport website's , and .

麻豆社 Radio 5 live will have Eleanor Oldroyd and Vassos Alexander reporting and presenting from Vancouver. The time zone means Vassos, who usually covers sport for , to report in live to his regular audience, just as he did at the Australian Open. He will also be commentating on the skeleton, women's two-man bobsleigh, and some of the snowboarding. Ellie will report in to the programme.

If you have any questions about our website's plans for the Olympics, I will answer them here. If you have questions about TV or radio coverage, I'll answer if I know, and if not I'll try to get you an answer.

If you have any questions about any other aspect of what we do on the 麻豆社 Sport website I will always be happy to answer them on .

Finally, there is another major sporting event coming up on the 麻豆社, the small matter of the . The 麻豆社's rugby editor, Carl Hicks, will write a blog here, on Friday, outlining coverage plans for TV, online and 5 live.

Correction (4 Feb, 0926) - I mentioned above that snow is being stockpiled at Whistler when in fact this actually happening at Cypress. Apologies.

When I blogged in November I gave what I hoped was a nice hint that we'd have some exciting content ready for the .

I wasn't able to actually say what we were planning, because the deal was not fully done, but when I said " ...it's definitely worth checking the site around the day of the draw for some content that ought to really whet the appetite ahead of football's greatest event ..." I was referring to (the 32nd, South Africa, did not have to qualify of course, as hosts).

However, sports rights is a devilishly complicated business, and therefore I need to explain what you can and cannot see on this website today, especially to users of the site outside the UK.

Have a look at how the various teams made it into today's draw in Cape Town

Now, if you're outside the UK, the situation is a bit more complicated. The rights to the action from various federations tends to be divided up on a territory-by-territory basis. That means that right now you aren't able to see any of the South American or African highlights. If and when the situation changes we will let you know.

As I say, there are few parts of our business as complex as broadcast rights for sports action, so I hope this makes sense.

Whatever video you can access in your region, you will find it . As for the rest of our coverage today, we will start our live text commentary at noon, with . The TV coverage is on 麻豆社2 from 1715 GMT, with commentary from Jonathan Pearce and that, along with with Mike Ingham and Ian Dennis, will be available through this website for UK users.

Please enjoy the coverage of today's draw, and please do let me know what you think.

Lewis

I missed October, although my bosses, Ben Gallop and Barbara Slater, both blogged, so hopefully that got me off the hook! But I'm back now, with a few things to mention.

In the case of sport, you can quite easily see why traditional headlines do not help the audience find those stories on search engines. Down the years, users of newspapers and then websites got used to seeing Liverpool referred to as the Reds, for instance, but I doubt many Liverpool fans out there search online for Reds very often. You would presumably type in Liverpool. Equally, Gerrard is not as good as Steven Gerrard if you are trying to help people find a story about that particular player.

The headlines on both the News and the Sport websites have been a set length (between 31 and 33 characters) for around seven years now, because the same stories have been used on Ceefax as well as online. Ceefax's maximum headline length is 33, and we decided that editorially anything less than 31 was too short on that platform. But although this restriction came about because of the platform, rather than for editorial reasons, we found that 31-33 characters allowed you to sum up just about any story perfectly adequately.

For this reason - and because Ceefax will survive for a few more years yet - we are keeping this length of headlines on our front page, and sport-by-sport pages (we call them indexes, or indices for the pedants in the office). But when you click through to the actual story itself, you will generally see a more expansive headline with more information to help those using search engines.

Apart from that change, it's been a quieter period for sports news recently, or it was until , which prompted a flood of interest and coverage, and saw a surge of visitors to our website.

Our live coverage of the reaction to Thierry Henry's handball

The day after the handball, last Thursday, . There was so much to cover, coming in thick and fast, that we felt this was the best way to present it, and it also allowed us to use contributions from our audience, via 606, Twitter and text.

If you saw this rolling text coverage on Thursday, I would be interested to know what you thought about it as a way of covering live, updating sports news. Generally, we only use it to cover actual live sport, rather than reaction to live sport!

Away from the week-to-week coverage, the two biggest events that are coming up for 麻豆社 Sport, and which we are now in the middle of planning for, are the and the football .

We will roll out the first version of our Winter Olympics site in December, to coincide with the return to TV screens of a new series of . The full version of the site will come in time for the start of the event itself, which takes place in Vancouver from February 12-28.

By the time we get to the event, our site will have live streaming of all the TV coverage (for UK users only) plus catch-up video for those that find the time difference (Vancouver is eight hours behind GMT) difficult.

There will be live text commentary, Tweets and blogs from reporters including Sir Matthew Pinsent and Lizzie Greenwood-Hughes, schedule, results and medals tables, reports and photo galleries, venue guides, sport-by-sport guides, athlete profiles, and more.

The next big date for the World Cup is the draw in Johannesburg on 4 December. Again, we will have some brand new content in time for that, with much more to follow when the tournament gets a little nearer (it's 11 June to 11 July).

Plans for the World Cup are a little less advanced than for Vancouver, but I will keep returning here to update, and it's definitely worth checking the site around the day of the draw for some content that ought to really whet the appetite ahead of football's greatest event, which is now a mouth-watering six-and-a-bit months away!

Lewis.

Lewis Wiltshire is the Editor of the 麻豆社 Sport website.

I apologised for the lack of action here during the previous few months, and said I wondered if the whole concept of hearing about the process of running a Sport site might not be a little, well, dry, compared to hearing about sport itself.

But a good number of you told me you enjoyed the entries on the , and suggested .

So with that feedback in mind I thought I would come back on here now, one month after the launch of the Football League season, to find out how everyone thinks it has gone so far (none of you had seen much of what we'd planned when we last spoke - now you have had a chance to do so), and also to announce an exciting football match which will be on this site on Thursday, and to announce a couple of new blogs.

I'll also try to answer any other questions about any other aspect of our site. Perhaps I could do just that on a monthly basis if everyone thinks it would be a good forum for feedback about bbc.co.uk/sport?

One is by , who will be our new European football blogger. We have felt for a while that we needed a presence on our football blog covering continental Europe. We have on there covering South American football; covers the SPL; covers the Premier League and covers the Football League; covers Northern Ireland and the Wales national team is looked after by our team in Cardiff on our main site, rather than the blog site (although with the top two Welsh clubs being leading lights in the Championship, I would expect them to also feature on Paul Fletcher's blog).

Further, the 麻豆社 World Service provides a whole section on . But what of mainland Europe? What of Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka? What of Gael Kakuta, whose move to Chelsea from Lens resulted in during the next two transfer windows? What of all the so-called big-five European Leagues apart from the Premier League (namely France, Italy, Germany, Spain)?

Phil Minshull's blog will focus on the latest issues in European football

Whenever this website writes about major European transfers or a big game like Real Madrid taking on Barcelona those stories are very popular with our audience.

A report on Barcelona's league opener against Sporting Gijon - a relatively minor game - pulled in over 100,000 readers.

So we asked John Sinnott, one of our senior journalists who has written a good deal for us himself on European football, to find us a European football blogger and we eventually asked Phil Minshull, an experienced news and sport journalist who has been based in and around Madrid, for the last 12 years, to write it for us. on this site was published today.

The other new blog belongs to , and is about American football.

The fact that the can sell out Wembley two years running for regular season games proves there is an audience for that sport in the UK, and last season this website had video highlights every week of the best matches (for a UK audience only).

We have an with fixtures, results and standings, also. But we also felt we needed a blog, particularly since our colleagues at are going to have an NFL show every Sunday evening on 5 live Sports Extra this season.

One of the pundits on that Sports Extra show will be Neil Reynolds, the well-known NFL expert and former Sky Sports pundit.

Pittsburgh Steelers celebrate their Super Bowl XLIII win

Neil has agreed to write a blog for us, and like Phil Minshull, also went live on Wednesday.

I hope the blog will appeal both to NFL diehards and also to new fans who are coming to the sport all the time. Hopefully we can even build an audience ahead of the NFL game at Wembley this year, between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New England Patriots, highlights of which will be shown on 麻豆社 television.

The Super Bowl in February will also be on 麻豆社 TV. Both those broadcasts will also be on this site for UK users.

Speaking of 麻豆社 TV output, on Thursday I am delighted to announce we will have the final of the women's European Championship football.

For those who have not been tuned to the exploits of Hope Powell's squad in Finland, England have reached the final where they will play Germany.

, and also streamed live on this site, in the UK.

We will also have live text commentary of the game, plus reports, reaction and photos. 麻豆社 commentator will be blogging before the game and again after.

The European Championship final between England and Germany on Thursday will be shown live on the 麻豆社

So now we're back on to football, what of the Football League? One month in, I am very pleased with how it has gone.

We have the video of every game in the Football League, Carling Cup and Johnstone's Paint Trophy on the site, we have a new 'match centre' when the games are being played, and we have new statistics services including live, 'as-it-stands' tables.

For anyone who wants to know more about the new services, it's worth looking at the so I don't have to bore those who already saw that by repeating what we're rolling out.

What I would be interested to do now is hear from those who commented last time, and have now had a chance to digest that coverage, and find out what you think about it. What do you like? What could be better?

One thing I do know - it's a fantastic time of year. Reluctantly, we have had to say goodbye to the Ashes, to the golf majors, to Wimbledon (although we're very much still covering Andy Murray in New York!), and shortly to rugby league and the rest of the summer sporting calendar.

But F1 is driving towards its season's climax, football is back, rugby union is back (with ) and we've a lot to look forward to, including a Winter Olympics and a World Cup next year.

I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts on any or all of that!

Lewis.

The 麻豆社 won the rights to be a , as part of a joint bid with , who will be the primary rights holder. Thus, from Saturday 8 August 2009, there will be a TV highlights show on Saturday nights on 麻豆社 TV after ("") wrapping up all the games from that day's matches in the , and , and on top of that, there will be an awful lot of highlights to watch for UK users on this website.

Namely, this website will be bringing you video highlights of every game in the Coca Cola Football League, and Johnstone's Paint Trophy. That is quite a simple way of stating what you will see on . How it gets there is a little more complicated.

麻豆社 Sport is in partnership with an independent production company, , as well as , on this project. Hence all of the 'film' (the industry term is "rushes") captured by the at each and every ground is sent to on the evening of the game. Here the rushes are edited into neat packages, ready for publication on the website at midnight the following day.

So, I will take a moment to clarify that, because it is not an easy thing to explain. We are allowed to publish from midnight the day after matches. We will try to get some content up on the stroke of midnight, but most of it will go live the following morning.

That means, if your team plays on a Saturday in any of the competitions I outlined above, you can expect to see a video edit of that game (approx two-five minutes) on this website when you get to your desk at 9am on Monday mornings. If your game is on a Tuesday night, check in with us on the Thursday morning. Sunday game? We should be showing that to you on Tuesday mornings. You get the picture!

In addition to the match edits, we will also offer a video edit rounding up all of the games from each division (one edit for each division) after each full programme of fixtures.

If you really cannot wait to see your team's goals online, there are two other options I can point you to. The Saturday night Football League Show will be on the , and a lot of club websites will be offering their own games earlier than we are allowed to, mostly (I believe) on a subscription basis.

The , plus one leg of each Carling Cup semi-final, and the final itself. Each of those live games will be streamed on this website (again, for UK users only), starting with ; and, coming so soon after his death, it should be a poignant occasion.

Beyond video, this site will also see some changes to the way we present live football coverage this season.

It used to be the case that our match previews used to become a bit, well, empty while the match was going on. We used to put "Match report to follow later" there, while a separate page carried a feed of live data, which we get from who have reporters at every ground. Hardly an ideal user experience.

Well, we think we've fixed that now.

When you read our match previews you will effectively be looking at what will become a 'match centre' for that game. When the game starts, all will feed straight into that page, and , and then finally, after the delay outlined above, the video from that match. Some of this content - principally the live data from PA - will be for the first time.

You should also see a bunch of new features including live scores modules on the right-hand side of ; as-it-stands tables which means every time a goal goes in, the will automatically update to show how things would look if the score stayed that way; an easy-to-view guide on club pages to your team's , , and others. Most of these new features will update automatically without you needing to wear out !

I have probably bored all but our most fanatical users into submission by now, so I shall stop, but I'm happy to answer any queries about Football League coverage on the web, or any other aspect of our website, and if your question is about the TV coverage, I am not responsible for that, but I'll see if I can find the answer - or get somebody more qualified to post here.

Lewis.

PS - it's been a while since we updated this Sport Editors Blog. Sorry. I tend to think that a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff on the website is a little dry! Plus where a lot of issues to do with TV coverage tend to get discussed, eg . Hence this area has become a little neglected. But I am happy to blog here if there's enough interest. I also won't take any offence if you choose to tell me that having read this one, you're happy to not see any more!

That's the (admittedly dull) buzzword we attached many months ago to a period of three months when we knew we would have to deliver for this website and the , with a thrown in for good measure and those huge annual events which need to be dealt with every summer - , , an , the climax of the and and .

Wimbledon has just finished, and today everyone is talking about arguably . Most days during Wimbledon and the Euros we had more than 3m people looking in - that figure has now become a benchmark for us during major events rather than a figure we aspire to occasionally which it used to be.

The challenge for me, and our team, will be to keep progressing the way we cover live sport. We have just launched which will run throughout the season as an accompaniment to the action. We will also be rolling out some new live during matches, and the way we present , which I feel will have an impact.

One thing we were able to do during Wimbledon was operate our ever-popular - most of these in all other sports are still done from our Television Centre base, with journalists watching the sport on video feeds, because we cannot take our publishing system on the road yet. But Wimbledon is effectively a 麻豆社 office, with the 麻豆社 network available on our laptops at SW19, so we had , and others running those text commentaries from where the action was, which made a nice change.

While technical solutions to do this more often are worked on, in the meantime, our plans for coverage of the Olympics online are in the final stages, with one month to go, and we're also nearly ready to roll out a new golf blog in time for the Open and the Ryder Cup.

And looking further ahead, everyone in 麻豆社 Sport is making preparations for coming back here in 2009, with the Football League on 麻豆社 TV and this website from 2009-10. on Sunday was proof, if it were needed, that F1 in general and he in particular can get the nation talking just as much as Messrs Nadal and Federer did later in the day, and on the website my challenge will be to reflect that. A lot going on - so I might enjoy this very brief moment of pause before we step it up again!

Whilst we did launch a new blog last autumn, for the , that was switched off once the tournament finished.

We are not planning to do that with the Euro 2008 blog, but instead are planning to keep it going as a general football blog once has finished.

Assuming things go to plan and the blog does become a general football blog, that would make today the first launch of a new permanent sport blog on the 麻豆社's blogging network since April 2007 and the launch of . It would also be the second sport-specific blog we have, joining the cricket blog, aka the .

But all of that is in the future - for now this new, one-day-old blog is focusing just on Euro 2008. , who will be running the blog for us from for the duration of the tournament, and , who runs 麻豆社 Sport's blogs from London, have both blogged already about what to expect, and more will follow.

It's worth noting that as well as the impressive castlist of writers on that blog, which Phil has introduced, we will also be running a feed into it - the second time we have done this.

When we ran a Twitter feed into the Rugby World Cup blog, my 麻豆社 colleague Robin Hamann called it "".

On that occasion our popular writers - this time , who has some experience of blogging from a major tournament, will be twittering and blogging around Austria and Switzerland, and we expect his Twitter feed to be more popular even than during the RWC.

As for the rest of our Euro 2008 coverage, we will blog nearer the time to outline our coverage plans for online, TV and radio more comprehensively. But I'm excited about the product we'll be offering during the tournament .

Regular users of the site will know that we've made great strides this year in the way we present video, and that will step up again during the Euros as we package the 麻豆社's video output on the web in industry-leading ways.

More to follow really soon on that, but for now, enjoy the new blog, and the rest of the , with pages for each country, from past tournaments for those in the UK (and especially for England and Scotland fans who can look back on the years their teams actually qualified!) and all the you could want, so you can plan your 23 days in front of the TV (or computer, or radio).

So users of will today see it change to be more consistent with our front page. We know that some users bookmark the football page or , and for those users the design will be brand new, but for anyone who goes through bbc.co.uk/sport to get to football, there should not be too much by way of a surprise.

and 麻豆社 Sport are determined to keep refreshing this website to stay ahead of the game - 麻豆社 News changed when this site did, in March, and the also had a major re-design recently.

In Sport, we wanted to make more of the space available on our pages, now that 95% of people have their screen resolution set to 1024 pixels or wider, so and the "index-level" pages will be too. We wanted to make , to capture the drama and excitement of sport, and we also needed to showcase . We think the Sport front page has been able to do that since the re-design, and we are looking forward to the football page doing the same.

We also wanted to make more prominent, given the 麻豆社's strong portfolio of rights including , , , , of the Premier League and Test match cricket, and from 2009, and the in video. We have been able to use audio and video across the whole , where it is editorially relevant, and not tucked away in its own section, which seemed increasingly anomalous.

It's worth adding also that the March re-design co-incided with us launching , rather than launching in separate windows. This has dramatically improved the traffic to AV, even though a lot of our rights to show live action are restricted to the UK only.

So our football page will now get this makeover, in time to showcase our , and in video and audio.

One important point about the football page - we promise to make sure the is still present and obvious. It's one of the most popular pieces of content across bbc.co.uk, never mind the Sport site, so we know lots of you will want to know exactly where it is. It will still be on the right-hand side of the page, roughly midway down, and it will not move around. For those of who subscribe to Gossip (or indeed ) on feed readers, nothing will change (except we'll continue to keep thinking about how we can improve the content within the Gossip column ...)

From there we will look to roll out the re-design to all our pages, with the in mind. So it was vital that the football page was overhauled before Euro 2008 (and even better that we've done it before the Champions League final) and we'll be aiming to do before , the (and the ) well before the , the before England's , before the , the and pages before the autumn (when Union kicks off again and League will be preparing for ), etc.

These dates might yet change, and in the meantime we'll also keep iterating the re-designed indexes we do have. For instance, as well as bringing back the list of headlines at the foot of the Sport homepage, we're also re-thinking the mastheads at the top amongst a host of other iterations.

So please - for instance, how you feel about the Sport front page now two months on - and we'll keep listening.