That's still largely the case, but watching the year's biggest sporting event via the Internet just got a whole lot easier. The Super Bowl, which is the most-watched television broadcast in the United States, will be streamed live to computers and smartphones, the NFL announced today.

In addition to being accessible on the desktop Web, the stream will be available via Verizon's NFL Mobile app, which is available on both iOS and Android.

It's not the first sporting event to be streamed live, but its certainly the biggest. If the networks ever wanted an opportunity to give large-scale live streaming a test run, this would be a pretty good one.

The Super Bowl attracts over 100 million viewers, most of whom will have no problem sitting around the television set per usual to watch the game. If anything, making it available online will expand the audience and may even offer the networks some interesting viewership statistics and a few takeaways about the future of television.

It's an impressive demonstration of how a large, mainstream website can have added meaning and structure.

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The BBC World Cup site featured over 700 webpages and was powered by a semantic publishing framework. The site boasted a comprehensive ontology (a map of concepts), that output "automated metadata-driven web pages" created on-the-fly.

Jem Rayfield, Senior Technical Architect, BBC News and Knowledge, explained further:

"The underlying publishing framework does not author content directly; rather it publishes data about the content - metadata. The published metadata describes the world cup content at a fairly low-level of granularity, providing rich content relationships and semantic navigation. By querying this published metadata we are able to create dynamic page aggregations for teams, groups and players."

The basis of this system was an ontology that described how World Cup facts related to each other. For example, "Frank Lampard" was part of the "England Squad" and the "England Squad" competed in "Group C" of the "FIFA World Cup 2010". The ontology also included "journalist-authored assets" such as stories, blogs, profiles, images, video and statistics.

The publishing platform had both manual and automated tagging features. BBC journalists could, for example, tag Frank Lampard in a story about the disallowed goal from England's last-16 loss against Germany. This is a normal part of most modern-day publishing systems (we tag content in this manner here at ReadWriteWeb). But the BBC World Cup site also automatically analyzed journalist content and matched it "against the World Cup ontology." It did this by using what it describes as a "natural language and ontological determiner process." [Update: IBM wrote in to inform us that the technology behind this was IBM LanguageWare.] This is similar to software such as Thomson Reuters' Calais or the new Extractiv product that we reviewed yesterday. In the BBC's case, the resulting tags were moderated before being published.

The BBC used Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and SPARQL to build their World Cup site. The stated goal was to achieve "intelligent mapping of journalist assets to concepts and queries."

The site reportedly served millions of page requests a day throughout the World Cup. The BBC may use this semantic publishing platform for other parts of the BBC sports site; and it will certainly deploy it again for the the London 2012 Olympics.

The official explanatory post has the technical details, should you wish to follow up. Let us know in the comments about other large scale Semantic Web deployments that you know of.

Update: See also The World Cup and a call to action around Linked Data, by the BBC's John O'Donovan. Thanks Georgi Kobilarov for the pointer.

While soccer (or football, for our European readers) might not be your thing, it is interesting to see how many TV networks have now made Twitter a part of their daily routine.

Some of Twitter's popularity in the TV world is obviously due to the novelty factor of Twitter, but Twitter does provide TV channels with an easy way to create a backchannel for their programs. CNN and other 24-hour cable news channels also regularly use Twitter (and Facebook). For example as a backchannel during live programming. Reading tweets is also a cheap way to fill airtime.

In addition, there is the now infamous Twitter TV show  that is not made by Twitter or even about Twitter (the company).

As our own Sarah Perez reported earlier this year, Verizon is also looking into incorporating a Twitter widget into its FiOS TV interface. For now, the FiOS interface still looks a bit clunky, and writing tweets doesn't look like an option given the lack of a keyboard, but it would be cool to see a constant stream of tweets about a specific show stream by on your TV, especially during live events.

How big is the Super Bowl? The Guardian summed it up this way:

"To put it into context, the American football showdown on 1 February between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals is America's equivalent of the World Cup, the FA Cup, Wimbledon, the Ashes and the Ryder Cup all rolled into one."

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're all for using the Web to make any experience better. So, we've gathered some of the best resources from around the Web to help you get the most out of your Super Bowl experience.

The Basics

The most obvious place to start is the official site for Super Bowl XLIII, hosted by the National Football League. This is by far the most comprehensive resource for the game. You can find additional details at NBC Sports Super Bowl XLIII.

More interested in the teams? Then head over to the official sites for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals.

Who's going to win is anyone's guess, but the experts have weighed in with their Super Bowl predictions. Knowing you, we're assuming you're much more trusting of the bloggers. So we'd also suggest you spend some time reading some fan predictions before the big game. Blogs.com has gathered the Bloggers' Guide to Super Bowl XLIII.

Of course, we're all interested in the technology associated with the show. And that makes Daily Wireless' detailed roundup of cameras, mobile coverage, wireless access, and more a great place to get an idea of all the tech at play during the game.

Getting Social with the Play by Play

Twitter will be full of Super Bowl tweets on Sunday. You can follow the official Super Bowl Twitter stream. If you're more interested in following your favorite team, then watch the mentions of the Steelers or the Cardinals as they stream in. Or watch the tweets side-by-side on the Twitter Bowl 2009

Interested in a more dynamic flow of comments? The real-time Friendfeed room for the Super Bowl is sure to gather in intensity as the game goes on.

Or if Facebook is more your style, you can install official apps for Super Bowl XLIII, the Steelers, and the Cardinals.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

Often discussion of the game itself is dwarfed by the discussion about the ads that run during the game. In fact, there's already been a great deal of hubbub about the first 3D ad to be aired during the Super Bowl, Hulu launching an ad campaign, and the fact that Monster is returning to the ad line-up for the show.

So we wanted to make sure that you were up to speed on all the Super Bowl Ads.

As with anything else, these days, there's the pre-requisite Twitter account for Super Bowl ads. Or for more than 140 characters at a time, the folks over at Mahalo will be live blogging the Super Bowl ads. They've also provided a number of links to the advertisers to help get you ready.

Interested in a higher level of criticism? Then get analytical about this year's ads with the Kellogg School of Management's Super Bowl Advertising Review blog. Or revel in the glory of Super Bowl ads past with MSNBC's Top 10 Super Bowl ads of all time or by voting CBS favorite Super Bowl ads of all time.

Walk Down Memory Lane

Speaking of nostalgia, there's no shortage of Super Bowl history at your disposal. Maybe this is your first time tuning into the Super Bowl. Or, maybe you'd just like a little more context for the game in general. Why not use the resources on the Web to give you that kind of context?

Who won Super Bowl I? What was the final score of Super Bowl XVI? When was the first Super Bowl played in February? Ask and the Internet delivers. Visit the NFL's site to review the scores, stats, and recaps for every one of the 42 previous Super Bowls.

Maybe you're more interested in the "Halftime Show" than the game itself. Dive into the history of one of the most watched performances in the world by visiting Rolling Stone. They've gathered details on this year's music and a look back at musical acts of past games.

And what historical review would be complete without the worst teams in Super Bowl history?

Snacks

What's the spectacle of the Super Bowl without snacks? If you're having trouble figuring out what to serve for the big day, the Web will help.

Wired provides some tips on making scientific Super Bowl snacks, including beer ice cream and puffed sauerkraut. Looking to keep in a little healthier? Try these green Super Bowl snacks.

And no matter how healthy you're trying to be, it's difficult to resist marveling at the Greatest Snack Food Stadium ever built.

... And All the Rest

Need more TV to watch the game? Obsessable has some tips on how to grab an HDTV for Super Bowl. Because "trying to watch the Super Bowl on a tiny television is the equivalent of sitting in the last row of Raymond James Stadium, with the Goodyear Blimp buzzing inches from your head."

Watching the game doesn't have to be hard on the earth, especially if you follow Supereco's 5 tips to green your Super Bowl.

And with the strangest Super Bowl addition - next to the Snack Food Stadium above - we close out with Smule's Sonic Lighter Super Bowl, where fans are encouraged to choose the lighter color of their respective team to show their support. Judging by the map, we'd say the Smule fans are pulling for the Steelers.

Enjoy the Game

That's just a smattering of some of the resources out there, but that's certainly enough to keep you busy until kickoff - and likely beyond. Enjoy the game.

I discovered OleOle at a taping session for a reality tv show about startups that I'm participating in. I'm one of the judges and one of the 20 startups competing for the grand prize is OleOle. OleOle is based in both New Zealand and the US, with its software development and technology HQed in NZ and marketing and sales in Los Angeles. It has 28 employees in total. The website has been in development for 2 years and the full launch was April.

OleOle has a full complement of social media features - personalized start page, blogging, photo sharing, videos, profiles, groups, news, voting, podcasts, forums, etc. It also features more traditional soccer website fare, such as fantasy leagues, live scores, tables, stats, and more. OleOle is going after a potentially huge vertical social network market - football fans. Football (soccer) is by far the world's most popular sport, and one of the few truly global football codes. There are an estimated 1 billion fans worldwide, according to OleOle.

OleOle has big plans. It wants to be "the future of football online" and already claims to be the leading social media site for football. I had some questions about that in the tv show taping, as sites like EPSN Soccernet and Yahoo Sports are also enormously popular online soccer sites. However OleOle does differentiate itself by being a purely social media site - they pointed out for example that the content is 100% fan generated (FGC instead of UGC?). Although not all of that is amateur content, as we shall see below.

OleOle has acquired some of the leading football blogs, such as the Chelsea Blog and the aptly named ArseBlog - a fan blog for English football club Arsenal. I say aptly named, because I'm a Manchester United fan - arch rivals of Arsenal :-) The one-man ArseBlog was acquired by OleOle a month ago. I have to admit, it has an awesome byline (see image). And you can see the potential payoff for OleOle owning ArseBlog in this post, about a player Arsenal may or may not be buying, which garnered over 1,500 comments (or "arses" in the site's lingo).

OleOle's revenue model is advertising, but it also plans to get into sponsorships, merchandising and ticketing. This is one of the advantages of using social web technologies for a mainstream audience - there is a potentially big and lucrative market, and soccer brings some added revenue options (match tickets, team jerseys, etc).

Right now the company isn't cashflow positive though. It's taken NZ$6 million in series A funding so far (mostly from its founders), and is currently shopping around for a Series B. OleOle aims to hit profitability by 2010, which not coincidentally is when the next football World Cup is on. Ultimately, OleOle could become an acquisition target itself, for a mainstream media company that covers soccer such as ESPN or any of the US television networks.

Overall OleOle is an impressive site and a great example of how the Social Web can be utilized in the real world. I'll be watching OleOle with interest, not only for the tv show but as an example of what can be done with web technologies for a mainstream audience. Another thing to watch is whether they use the platform they've built for other sports.