Thanks for taking part
I know we have been telling you about our big TV audiences, how sport can really bring the nation together in this wildly diverging media landscape. It's not just about England either but also those games which don't exactly keep all of us on the edge of their seats.
Personally I've been a bit of a loose end without football in the past couple of days (I loved some of your comments on that) so I have been looking at some other audience figures - to find out how many people have been "interacting" with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ around the World Cup.
Thousands of you are voting, rating, commenting, playing, sending and generally playing a massive role in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Sport World Cup experience - which is really fantastic.
Even with two days without football I haven't had time to count the masses of emails, texts and pictures you have sent, but has 668 photos alone.
We don't know how many of you have contributed to our World Cup blog but we have hundreds of comments on some posts and well over a million page impressions for the tournament. It's been a fascinating journey so far, with funny items and moving content living side by side. Us editors are even letting the boys off for crashing Svan since we needed something to liven up the lull in live action.
The have also proved a hit. Every match is attracting thousands of people and for England as many as 75,000 of you have given your verdict on the team's performance. We did originally fear deliberate concerted low marking of the Germans but their fine performances have now won through any prejudice. We've been able to use this data to provide some interesting editorial material as well as giving everyone the opportunity to rate performances.
You might have noticed that to contribute to the blogs and the player ratings you don't need a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ login. I've always had mixed feelings about registration schemes. One of the important things for player ratings is that you simply click a button and don't have to tell us your name and age but for some things they are essential and they do give further insight into the numbers of people contributing
The top 10 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ services for participation always feature plenty of sport services - our , Sportdaq and Challenge Lawro games. Last week we could say that seven of the top 10 services had a sport element to them, with people discussing the World Cup on a multitude of services including the children's message boards and .
Top of the charts for Sport/World Cup participation is the World Cup daq game which more than 50,000 people are clearly enjoying. Nearly as many have played the Goalfinger quiz.
That brings me, last but not least, onto our 606 service, which as many of you will be aware went through some painful pre-World Cup changes.
We've now had some data about the actual effect of what we did and I'm happy (and frankly quite relieved) to say that much of the audience has stuck with it.
There's no disguising that fewer people are contributing to 606, although with more than 12,000 active members posting material last week 606 was still bigger than any ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ message board, even if it's half the figure of the end of the football season. Early indications from some unaudited figures I probably shouldn't quote suggest that we have also lost very few of the users who read but don't contribute to 606.
However we're not complacent about this. I know that people want and deserve a better 606 so the other thing we've been doing when the matches haven't been on is getting together a project team who are now building a new service for the next football season.
We're looking for volunteers from the hundreds of thousands of people like you who are clearly interested to help us shape this, so please go and let us know if you want to help.
And thanks again for playing your part in the World Cup. Since Germany v Argentina is already 11 minutes old, that's it from me for a few more days.
