If you groggily signed onto YouTube this morning, you may have noticed a football soccer ball-shaped button on many of your videos’ bottom panel. You may then have pressed that button, and discovered a buzzing vuvuzela that drowns out the audio of whatever you’re watching. If you are like many people, you then proceeded to either Google “youtube vuvuzela” or Tweet about it (or post a Facebook status update about it, maybe?) because YouTube’s vuvuzela hax is currently a top trend on both Twitter and Google search. Truly, the World Cup brings nations together.

Great mockups for future World Cup stadiums (designboom)

Master Chief: Steampunk edition (Hawty McBloggy)

Gizmodo feature on possible anti-quorum sensing antibiotics in Belizean jungles (Gizmodo)

The inevitable Star Trek-Tik Tok mashup (io9)

Female condom with teeth deputs at World Cup (NY Daily News)

Neat profile of Elon Musk (NYT)

Do not try teaching science to Juggalos (Slashdot)

(title image via Agent M Loves Tacos)

Sins of a Solar Empire vs. Justin Bieber (Double Jump)

27 Huge Hamburgers (Urlesque)

Inside the Mind of an Anonymous News Site Poster (Boston.com)

Kim Jong-il Looks at a Radish (The Telegraph)

The Goofiest Masters of the Universe Toy Commercial (Points of Articulation)

World Cup: England vs. Algeria in LEGOs (SportsGrid)

ThinkGeek’s Best Cease and Desist (ThinkGeek)

(pic via Tsaoshin.)

It’s official. The 2010 World Cup is the biggest thing to ever happen to the internet, ever. According to Akamai.com’s Net Usage Index, net traffic on the first day of the World Cup surpassed the former leading event (Barack Obama‘s presidential election victory) by 30%.

Some of the inevitable consequences of this have been noticed by internet users. Twitter, for example, prone to hiccups on a good day, has been flying the Fail Whale to and fro.

The Globe & Mail reports on one strange side effect of the increase in traffic: a twitter campaign to save a rare Brazilian parrot. So rare, in fact, that does not actually exist.

The 2010 World Cup officially begins this morning, with Mexico’s match against South Africa kicking off at 10:00am EDT. But the road to the tournament has been long: Not only have the players been going through rigorous training and conditioning for months, but teams, countries, and companies have held some pretty out-there promotions, encompassing tech, design, and adorable soccer-playing animals.

After the jump, 18 of the 2010 World Cup’s coolest promotions:

For reasons as yet unknown, Adidas has shot a maniacally Star Wars-themed World Cup ad which jam-packs celebrity cameos into an elaborate reenactment of the cantina scene. If you’ve ever wanted to see Snoop Dogg wield a lightsaber or witness David Beckham and Daft Punk not only occupy the same room, but occupy the same room which is filled with aliens and unnervingly similar to the Mos Eisley cantina, this just might be for you!

Our brethren at SportsGrid have more thoughts on the ad and its unique approach to “celebrat[ing] originality.”

The 2010 FIFA World Cup doesn’t officially kick off until Friday, June 11th, but it looks like Google is already ramping up for the games. If you search for the phrase ‘world cup’ on Google, in addition to returning a schedule of upcoming mascots and a notice as to which teams are playing in which groups, the usual “Goooooooooogle” at the bottom of the page is replaced with a more soccer-friendly “Gooooooooooal!”

But ‘World cup’ isn’t the only search that reveals this small Easter egg:

In an onslaught of adorableness, these perky little penguins have donned their national colors to support South Korea in the World Cup this year. If I played soccer for South Korea and saw these little guys, that would be all the motivation I’d need to win it all. While the trainer interviewed in the video explains the reasons why he put on the little publicity stunt, he doesn’t appear to have trained the penguins very well. The goalie is way out of the goal zone and the penguins seem content to just stand there most of the time. Also, there appears to only be one team, so South Korea wins either way.

Then again, this soccer game probably ended as only a soccer game can: In an epic, nail-biting 0-0 tie.

Hyundai is the official auto sponsor of FIFA, and in honor of this year’s World Cup in South Africa, they’ve whipped up two special-edition i10s, covered with turf and sporting gigantic soccer balls on top and on the wheels. Not sure about how we feel about the roof soccer ball, but the grassy exterior is pretty cool.

The cars will be touring South Africa when the World Cup events kick off on June 11th.

More pics below: