Fifa 2010

thanks to a chemical and biological engineer at Northwestern University who is also a self-proclaimed football fanatic, we can compare our number-crunching with a much-touted new algorithm. Professor Lu?s Amaral's rating system, unveiled Wednesday in the online journal PLoS ONE, was first put to the test after the 2008 European Cup, when it ranked the 20 best footballers that played--a list that lines up pretty well with general analysis.

With World Cup Football frenzy gripping online users, micro-blogging site Twitter has warned of possible outages due to heavy traffic during the event. Twitter has been grappling with many site problems in the past week, resulting in outages and poor performance.

World Cup fever pushed the Internet to a new record on Friday, according to measurements from Akamai. Traffic to news sites globally started a steady climb about 6 a.m. Eastern time and peaked six hours later at noon, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors per minute.

Yahoo has signed English footballer David Beckham as Global Football Ambassador for its coverage of the 2010 World Cup and the 2010/11 football season. According to the company, Beckham will participate in the Yahoo marketing campaign throughout the summer of sport.

For one month every four years, the world turns its attention to 736 men from thirty-two nations, brought together by one passionate pursuit: global soccer domination.