Bring Back The Cup

New Zealand are back at it, trying to bring the America's Cup to New Zealand. As much as I was disappointed to see Alinghi and it's crew of Kiwi traitors win the cup - one of the many good things to come out of it has been the America's cup web site. It's got everything you could want (well, it's close) and more.

Stunning graphics, real-time race scoring and radio, plenty of history and commentary - brilliant. What's missing? Well - most of the things I normally hold dear - stuff like focused RSS feeds, community (and related ranking of content), blog aggregation... The rest makes up for it though.

Compare this to Toyota's pathetic effort only available to Kiwi's onshore. Nuts! It's a global event with a global audience. What are you thinking!

Team NZ's presence it very light-weight also. Pretty much a standard site with little sizzle. The downside to this is probably going to be most felt in merchandising and growth of the TNZ community. You've got to activate the community through participatory technology or, excuse the pun, miss the boat. Ok, Oracle BMW racing has a bigger budget but that's no excuse - I know plenty of Kiwi talent that would have done the TNZ site for the privilege. Their site is a stunner. Blog, great photos, live racing and more. Still, in both cases, no apparent RSS -and TNZ has them on downloads and content. I hope they also take them on the water....


Technorati Tags: America's Cup, Team New Zealand