Between the Stanley Cup, the NBA finals, the French Open and the World Cup, it?s a dizzying time for sports fans willing to admit there is more to life than Barry Bonds? home run record or the status of St. Louis Rams QB Kurt Warner?s sore thumb.

It?s also a challenging time -- emphasis on the word time -- for U.S. fans of two of those sports: tennis and soccer. Because of the differences in time zones, the action is over or nearing an end when the alarm goes off for most of us in the morning.

As crazy as the few hours time difference between Paris and the U.S. can make a tennis watcher, being a soccer fan requires living in a different temporal universe altogether. With this year?s World Cup being staged in South Korea and Japan, matches are taking place a disorienting 16 hours away from the West Coast.

		Between the ability to publish 24/7 and the capacity to provide significantly more space for niched content, the World Cup is a perfect opportunity for the Internet to shine

When it comes to coverage, mix in 32 teams, at least two matches per team, three rounds and the periodic table starts to look simple in comparison. It is by any definition an enormous amount of information to present even before a single match takes place. Keeping tabs on it as a live event is an equally daunting task.

As one editor notes, reporters are filing to his Web site 24 hours before people will read their stories in the print edition. That?s if the print edition has room for all the coverage. Between the ability to publish 24/7 and the capacity to provide significantly more space for niched content, this is a tailor-made opportunity for the Internet to shine.

But is it worth the time and energy, the resources diverted from other efforts? In Europe, Asia, Latin America  possibly everywhere but the U.S.,  the answer in most instances is likely to be yes. In fact, it could be costly not to provide in-depth coverage. In the U.S., where soccer has achieved lasting popularity as a participant sport (my six-year-old niece is already a veteran) but is still vying for status as a national spectator sport, the response varies as wildly as the quality of the Web sites.

Somewhere between the late-breaking news in Spanish from the Associated Press on DallasNews.com and the discovery that the World Cup ranked second to last on the sports page at DetroitNews.com on the eve of a major match, it hit me. As a big believer in home-grown coverage designed to fit the community a site serves, I had a tendency in days gone by to be ever so dismissive if news organizations in the mid-to-large range went the cookie-cutter route. This was enhanced by my wandering ways and the irritation that cropped up when I ran into the same content at site after site. That attitude started to shift during coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympics; after all, if the AP or Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service produce a high-quality interactive graphic depicting the trajectory of the luge why should their clients reinvent the wheel?

It may have taken a sport that I'm not passionate about -- although watching the U.S team stun Portugal certainly increased my enthusiasm -- to drive the realization home. Just as syndicated news has its place in print, it can play a vital role for online news outlets, especially if the alternative means ignoring a global event likely to be of intense interest to some of your subscribers. Preferably, the package can be easily customized to make room for localized content and creativity. Ideally, a site in these circumstances would mesh syndicated content with its own look and feel.

It?s hard to find an excuse for a site that thinks of itself as major ignoring an event on this scale. It?s not the Olympics with endless local tie-ins but it appeals to enough diverse elements of the Internet audience to merit attention. You can?t argue with the Stanley Cup taking precedence at DetroitNews.com but the World Cup as second to last at the bottom of a laundry list? I thought it might be a momentary lapse so I went back after Wednesday?s match. Hockey topped the front page  again, rightly so in a place called Hockeytown,  but the story making noise worldwide couldn?t be found in the Top Sports box, crowded out by a boxing bout scheduled for Saturday and an NBA curtain raiser for Wednesday night?s game. I finally found a mention of the World Cup under AP Multimedia towards the bottom of the front page. On the sports page, the other Cup had crawled up the page to the number two spot.  Better but if I?m a soccer fan in Detroit I?m not counting on this site to feed my habit.

On the other hand, if I?m a fan in Minneapolis, odds are I feel the love from StarTribune.com, which has an elegant, complete microsite with a member of the Minnesota Thunder answering questions in a forum, a photo gallery, a World Cup Journal and lots of headline coverage.  The front-page presence is visible; sports-wise the Cup played second-fiddle to Tuesday?s incredibly odd 23-2 Minnesota Twins victory over the hapless Cleveland Indians, but it was a decision that made sense.

Soccer fans who subscribe to the Online Wall Street Journal aren?t likely to feel ignored either. The Online Journal?s World Cup coverage strikes just the right balance. It?s unlikely that any but the most casual fan is relying on the Wall Street Journal?s Web site for breaking news about matches.

Managing Editor Bill Grueskin explains: ?We realized that as a global news site, we had a responsibility to reflect coverage of the World Cup, recognizing at the same time that soccer isn't our core coverage area.? Instead, the Online Journal with its global audience plays to its strengths and offers paths to sites that do some things better. The low-key package has a prominent link from the front page, includes links to the Journal?s myriad in-depth stories from its various editions, a feature that sends users to the site or sites of the day and a link to partner MSNBC.com?s breaking coverage and stats.

Belo Interactive takes an approach that works for its more regional, U.S. audience -- sharing content between its sites but customizing per site instead of offering a ?Belo? World Cup site. Flagship DallasNews.com provides content in English and Spanish, although not everything is in both languages. The site is constantly updated and, like StarTribune.com, probably offers enough for most fans and links to more. Given the investment, it was a little odd Wednesday afternoon to visit the site and see only a low-profile headline in the sports list pointing to the coverage. Even odder, clicking on that headline led to a story with a 2002 World Cup navigation sidebar that didn?t make it clear the site had its own package. Only when I clicked on ?more coverage? did I end up at the right place. If I didn?t know it was there, I?m not sure I would have found it, although I might have noticed ?W.Cup? in the left-hand navigation for the sports section.  If you?re going to build it, make sure they come.

Knight Ridder?s RealCities special section is blue. Very blue. The news page is a long list of headlines. An hour after the U.S.-Portugal game ended, the matches page still hadn?t been updated to include the story and box score. The most interesting feature tracks each team?s history in the World Cup; a quick look drove home the rare nature of Wednesday?s U.S. win.

At least RealCities users could visit USAToday.com for the box score and game story posted by 7:01 E.T. (The site also offers one of the most amusing World Cup-related offerings  Sports  Survival Island where voters get to pick which of the week?s top sporting events they would cross off if they could only pick one event to watch. A different event is voted off the island each day with the Tyson-Lewis fight as the first victim followed by the French Open.)

Or they could bookmark ESPN?s well-done Soccernet.com, which offers a version of its real-time GameCast for soccer. It was fun to watch the main ESPN site change track Wednesday morning  with a deft switch between the Stanley Cup feature that had been leading the page and the World Cup box on the upper right. It went from ?Hurricanes? warning? to ?American Beauty? in minutes. The first choice of pictures was boring but by 8 a.m. Eastern it was gone, replaced by an action shot showing activity that could be illegal in some states.

Even sports Web sites have to think carefully about how they approach a sport with limited but hard-core appeal. It might seem like a no-brainer for FoxSports.com, nestled in the heart of the football-mad Murdoch empire. But as Adam Bain, vice president of production & development, FoxSports.com reminds us, companies have gone out of business by trying to feed hard-core fans of sports that suffer from coverage.

Soccer is unique, says Bain, because the potential audience is greater. "The World Cup supports a bigger hard-core fan base-- and even converts people on the fringe for the month into hard- core folks."

Like the Nagano Olympics, which happened while most of the U.S. was sleeping, the time difference adds to the appeal. Says Bain, "Hard-core fans can follow on the Web live and get instant stories and analysis during the games and casual fans can get a range by checking in the morning when they get to work."

And if they can?t get it from you, they?ll find it someplace else. An event like the Belmont Stakes or the Tyson-Lewis bout might not do much damage  but if you?re in charge of a site and how to cover the World Cup is your decision to make the first question you have to answer is ?Do I want to train my readers to go someplace else every morning for a month??