Attempt to compare Cricket and Football World Cup

It’s the Cricket season. First the international focus with the ICC World Cup 2011 and then the domestic blast of IPL 4. 

Now that the #WC11 is already underway, some concerns are being raised that fewer teams contesting would make the game more competitive and enjoyable. First it was in the reports that the 50 over game is under threat and only the success of #WC11 can make it survive, then it was about minnows not giving any competition to the stalwarts.

2010 saw the FIFA world cup and now every “paul” is referred to Psychic should make you understand the popularity of the game and general interest in it. Immense competition and ‘Vuvuzelas’ made the game more enjoyable and it was a huge success both for the spirit of the game and economically too, especially for the hosting country.

Just to compare two of the most famous games and their impacts here’s a small Comparison:

Vs 

The Game:

·         Football as a game wins because of the speed, lesser play time and more action. It is played in more countries of the world than Cricket.

·       Cricket has been traditionally a longer scheduled game and is evolving to be a shorter action packed adventure with the 20-20 world cup and the likes.

The Impact:

·         FIFA 2010 was supposedly the most viewed event in the sporting history. I do not think #WC11 will be able to surpass that record.

·         Impact of Cricket however, on the sub continent is very huge more so because of the lack of football action.

·         In India Cricket is the last word. Think it like this: How many people would leave a India vs XYZ match for FIFA qualifier or for that matter UEFA cup match, leave alone the domestic matches.

Media and Promotion

·         While ESPN has a $ 2 billion USD contract to broadcast he games around the world FIFA had sold its rights to multiple channels across countries and some free to air channels too.

·         Although in terms of sheer advertising revenue FIFA would loose because of the shorter version of the game and lesser slots for advertising, it will still be ranked higher because of the more eyeballs it grabs.

Although the points try to make an emphasis on football emerging to be on the upper hand against cricket, but personally I am more of a cricket spectator than football. Hope to see some great moments and intense action in the upcoming games. 

If you like the idea of comparing the two games, leave your views in the comments.

The curious case of Internet Meme

Disclaimer: The following post is a very useless post about one word that got me into spending some time on the net discovering what I present below. Please read further only if you have nothing better to do except wasting time on Facebook applications.

Type any twitter handle into Google and we get to see a host of websites using twitter feeds, twitter handle groups, follower lists, re-tweets etc. I found something interesting here’s a screenshot:

It was interesting to find the last website, at first I did not much understand the meaning of the website except may be it filed my tweets with cricket as the keywords. But I was interested to know the meaning of the word “meme”

As per Wikipedia:

A meme, a relatively newly coined term, identifies ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another. The concept comes from an analogy: as genes transmit biological information, memes can be said to transmit idea and belief information.

When I checked into the website www.tweetmeme.com I came to understand that what it did was, to classify the most shared or rather discussed links on the micro blogging site twitter. The what how and why has been answered by them here

So what is the concept here? I thought it may be just a stand alone website catering to twitter like the ancillaries to big businesses. But no, we now have many such “memes” across the internet that helps the reader to check out the latest trends and discussions on the web on a particular topic of interest. For example techmeme is solely catering to technology news and updates being shared by us the users.

This is pretty much what I could do with one word. If you are genuinely pissed off after reading this article, vent your anger in the comments section.