TURKU, Finland -- Oasis of the Seas, the world's largest cruise ship with seven neighborhoods, a leafy Central Park, and a retractable smokestack to duck under bridges built for lesser vessels -- will make a splash when it arrives with a flotilla at its home port of Port Everglades Friday morning.

But the colossal ship has been living in a fishbowl of media, new and old, for more than a year -- with much of the buzz engineered by image makers at Royal Caribbean International.

``They have Twitter, Facebook. They're really making the ship a cult of personality,'' says Bob Cook, vice president of cruise sales at Go Travel in Orlando.

Miami-based Royal Caribbean's Oasisoftheseas.com, which has been chronicling the ship's construction and delivery in blow-by-blow webisodes, has attracted some 4.8 million unique visitors.

The company portal evokes the sense that the $1.4 billion ship, which is nearly as tall as the nation's Capitol and almost four football fields long, is making history with its radical design, including an open-air atrium with 12,000 plants, bushes and trees.

Richard D. Fain, the corporate chairman and chief executive, and Adam M. Goldstein, chief executive of the Royal Caribbean unit, both took time out from hobnobbing with VIPs at the ship's delivery ceremony in Turku, Finland, on Oct. 28 to update personal blogs where they muse about the 5,400-passenger vessel.

``In many ways it's more comfortable to talk about something in a blog than it is in a press release,'' Goldstein said. ``We've had a lot of fun with it.''

VIDEO LOG

William Wright, the Miami-born captain of the ship, has starred in daily online video updates of the ocean crossing. Some 8,000 hits the first day at sea swelled to 100,000 on Day 2, and 210,000 by the third day, when Oasis retracted its telescopic funnel to pass under Denmark's Great Belt Bridge with just a small clearance.

During the crossing, Goldstein chatted live with USA Today readers on the paper's cruise blog, fielding questions such as why passengers can't bring their own wine onboard and what are the plans for cruising in Cuba.

In a chat about whether squeezing Oasis under a Danish bridge was a nail-biter, Goldstein wrote: ``We were completely confident the ship would make it under the Great Belt Bridge regardless of weather conditions. What we did not know was that the photo/video of the event would go all over the world.''

ABC's Good Morning America will broadcast live from 7 to 9 a.m. Nov. 20 aboard the Oasis of the Seas, marking the ship's official public debut. Oasis then will be opened to throngs of journalists and travel agents.

But she is already famous the world over.

Last weekend, NBC's Saturday Night Live figured the ship is well-known enough to make a crack about Oasis' vulnerability to pirates. The joke promptly was uploaded to YouTube.

Kenneth Holt, a retired naval officer from Jacksonville who has been tracking the ship's progress online in anticipation of his August 2010 voyage, already knows details of the AquaTheater, a huge pool and amphitheater, and is dazzled with the design of its beach pool, which has a sloped entry to mimic ocean wading.

``It's got a lot of different things that make you say `Wow!''' Holt said. ``Not just the size, but what they plan to offer. It's going to be so intriguing, you may not want to leave the ship.''