Shiny Media

With the insight of a Platini pass, the invention of a Cruyff turn and the sense of humour of Carlos Valderrama's barber, Shiny Media introduces Who ate all the Bratwurst, the only World Cup blog worth its transfer fee. Wilkommen to you all.

Over the next two months in the build-up to the planet's greatest sporting event, and during Germany '06 itself, WaatB will be the site to visit for World Cup news, views, team and venue guides, features, live game blogs, competitions and much more cool stuff.

So bookmark us now, lie back and think of England... because fußball's coming home.

WaatB is Shiny Media's 20th blog. The company is the leading commercial weblog company in the UK and its sites attract a monthly audience of over a million unique visitors.

OK that was a long 24 hours. But it's been a hectic old week since The Guardian Changing Media conference last Monday. We've been spending quite a bit of our time here at Shiny Media recently talking to various media and business types about blogging and it's clear that the message is starting to get through.

In particular many ad agencies are waking up to the fact that people who are passionate about their products are some of the very same people who are reading our blogs. We spoke to a few ad agency folk at The Guardian Changing Media conference who attended the Commercial Impact of Blogging seminar which we spoke at and they seemed receptive to what we are trying to do.

Of course we've not been shy about talking about some of the deals we've done with companies like Dyson and Sony and the results they have achieved. But it's a long old haul. Many ad agencies are still very 'old school' in their thinking, preferring to play it safe with placing ads in offline media and, maybe, a Yahoo! if you're lucky. Industry figures show that only 5 to 7 per cent of ad spending is is online which is absolutely crazy when you think how TV audiences/newspaper and magazine readership is constantly being eroded by the power of the internet.

We believe that's going to change though and with 1.1 million unique visitors to our sites in March we think we're in a pretty strong position to take advantage of future advertising opportunities at the same time as delivering quality editorial content.

Chris