Many of us will wake up on Monday morning feeling slightly depressed that the 2009-10 Premier League season is over. All that’ll remain from the English football season will be the FA Cup Final, Europa League Final and playoff matches in the Football League. Not to diminish those exciting events, but many of us will be keeping one eye on the upcoming World Cup which will be just 32 days away.

I’m particularly excited about the 2010 World Cup because of the advancements in technology. This will be the first World Cup in HD. It’ll be the first Twitter World Cup. And technically the first Facebook World Cup. And, don’t forget, it’ll be the first World Cup for Apple iPhone users. The amount of information at our finger tips will be awesome and overwhelming at the same time. It’s going to be the most plugged-in World Cup in the history of the sport. A large part of that is because of the Internet.

It seems bizarre to think that it was only four years ago that the 2006 tournament was the first real time that the Internet embraced the World Cup. In 2002, the web was still reeling from the post dot-com bubble disaster. Plus the time difference between Asia and North America was horrible. We were lucky enough to watch the games in the middle of the night, let alone switch on the computer to follow the news. Four years prior to that, in 1998, the Internet was still so new that America Online (AOL) as well as Compuserve and other ISPs were our destinations. And any information we could glean about the World Cup was a precious commodity.

Thinking back, the 2006 World Cup was a trendsetter for a few different reasons. It was the birth of The Guardian’s daily The World Cup Show podcast starring James Richardson. The show would later morph into Football Weekly, one of the best soccer podcasts in the business. It was also a summer when I would argue that football blogs were born, or became massively popular. The two shining examples at the time were the BBC’s World Cup 2006 Blog and FoxSoccer.com‘s brilliant blog posts from their team who were on the ground in Germany. Fox’s bloggers extraordinaire that summer included Jamie Trecker, Nick Webster, Oliver Hinz and, back in North America, Bobby McMahon.

Other than those two blogs, The Guardian podcast and Phil McThomas’s trusty Soccer Shout podcast, and BBC’s Sport section, that was pretty much the lion share of sites I visited that glorious summer. Contrast that with this summer and the sheer quantity and quality of sites, blogs, iPhone apps, Facebook, Twitter and TV coverage, and you can quickly see how 2010 will be the biggest World Cup ever because people will be more connected. It’ll be everywhere.

But just as many of you have begun to make your plans regarding where and how you’ll watch the World Cup (if you haven’t, don’t worry — our sister site WorldCupBuzz.com will be providing plenty of helpful articles to guide you through the tournament), have you thought about what online destinations will you be visiting this summer to find the news, stories and analysis that you’ll crave? If you were a soccer fan during the 2006 World Cup, will the sites you visit this summer be different than four years ago or will you go back to those classics? Do you envision yourself consuming more of your World Cup news and content via mobile phone this summer?

Please share your valuable insight with me and the readers of EPL Talk in the comments section below. And feel free to share your memories of following previous World Cups online and what the experience was like. We’ve certainly come a long way.

Thanks to everyone who voted for EPL Talk in the 2008 Soccerlens Awards. Alas, EPL Talk didn’t win, but we did achieve the runner-up spot in the Best British Blog category, as well as having the honor of narrowly beating The Guardian’s Football Weekly in the Best Football Podcast category. Take that Barry Glendenning ; )

In the coming weeks, stay tuned to EPL Talk for some big changes including a brand-new redesign, new podcast interviews, more posts and more. I won’t let the cat out of the bag quite yet, but I’m confident you’ll be pleased with the enhancements.

Now back to the regularly scheduled programming!

It may be just me, but lately I’ve been burned out listening to podcasts. So much so that my weekly diet of half a dozen different shows has now dwindled down to one or two. The same goes for non-soccer podcasts too. I find myself occupying my listening time with my newest addiction, Audible books, but that’s a story for another time.

When I do listen to football podcasts, I find them more enjoyable when I listen to them a couple of days after they’ve published so I can hear whether their mid-week and weekend predictions were on target or completely off-base. It helps me gain a better appreciation of how knowledgable the experts really are.

So earlier this weekend, I tried a new podcast. New for me, at least. It’s been around several months, but now is available only on the EPL Talk Podcast stream at iTunes and here. Hosted by Johnathan Starling, The Third Half is quite unique as it takes you around the leagues of Spain, Italy, England, United States and Europe all in one show.

To me, I judge the quality of a podcast by whether I learn things from it. In the case of The Third Half, I learned quite a bit about the lesser known teams in the Champions League thanks to Starling and interview guest Lonnie Smetana who was interviewed during one of the segments. I also enjoyed the analysis of Serie A and La Liga, which was a lot more well rounded instead of the brief remarks I usually find on The Guardian’s Football Weekly Podcast.

Well rounded is a good description of the entire Third Half podcast. If you’re the type of individual who enjoys learning about what’s happening in most of the major leagues around the world, give the show a chance. Try to ignore the audio quality, which I’m sure will improve on future episodes but listen instead to the knowledgable exchange of football discussion between the host and his guests during the interview portions.

You can hear the latest episode here:

[display_podcast]

There are only 11 days (or 264 hours) between now and the beginning of Euro 2008, and it all seems a lot like World Cup 2006 all over again.To me, World Cup 2006 was the zenith of soccer coverage on the Internet. I watched all of the matches on a daily basis from my desktop (now that I’m no longer at that employer I can come clean and praise the efforts of our IT staff who diligently hooked up a satellite on top of our office building and then relayed the ESPN2 coverage to the desktops of the few soccer diehards in the building).

But I also consumed lots of excellent coverage from the Internet to help supplement my daily diet of World Cup matches. The four major parts of my diet during that glorious summer were the daily doses of (1) the Soccer Shout Podcast, (2) The Guardian’s World Cup Podcast, (3) the blogs from the Fox Soccer writers stationed in Germany including Oliver Hinz, Nick Webster and Jamie Trecker, and last but not least, (4) the BBC World Cup Blog.

Speaking of the BBC World Cup Blog, the Beeb has returned with a new blog, this time for Euro 2008. The BBC’s new Euro 2008 blog will include articles from a cast of characters including Gavin Peacock, John Murray, Jacqui Oatley, the one and only Fletch and many others.

A new feature that I’ll be looking forward to this summer is the acquisition of artist Paul Trevellion and his “You Are The Ref” comic strips, which will become a regular feature of the blog throughout the summer.

Meanwhile, The Guardian has already announced that it’ll be returning to the podcasting airwaves with a daily episode during Euro 2008. Now all we need is the return of Soccer Shout (c’mon Phil) and Fox Sports to get their act together so we can dream we’re experiencing World Cup 2006 all over again.

EPL Talk will be joining in the fun with our own Euro 2008 coverage from the expert bloggers (plus my coverage live from Switzerland for the Italy against Holland game).