Congratulations to a former colleague of mine, Alex Balfour, on his appointment as Head of New Media for the London 2012 Organising Committee - the body which is responsible for staging the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.

Alex, whom I worked alongside (in a cyberspace manner of speaking) with CricInfo between 1996 and 2001, will be responsible for London2012.com, according to the LOCOG press release issued last Friday. Answering to the LOCOG Director of Communications and Public Affairs, Alex will lead the creation, development and management of online structures and facilities for London 2012 over the next six years.

I am sure Alex will excel in his new role and I wish him all the best. Nonetheless, I should draw attention to a factual howler that appears in the LOCOG press release and has found its way into the headings of a few reports on the appointment:

As co-founder and Chairman of CricInfo Alex built one of the world’s largest sports websites from scratch with 20 million customers.

By no stretch of the imagination can Alex be considered a “co-founder” of CricInfo. Alex first became involved with CricInfo in 1995 as a volunteer, a few months before I did, at which time it already had an established presence on the internet as a gopher database hosted on a server at the University of Oregon. CricInfo was founded by Dr Simon King in 1993, and while a number of US-based Indian expats came on board in those formative days of IRC, telnet and gopher, Alex’s involvement was still two years away.

Alex was, however, a foundation member of CricInfo’s board of directors when it became a corporation towards the end of 1999, when he was employed by us as Head of Business Development. (Does this make him a “co-founder” of CricInfo? I’m probably one too, having been one of 53 foundation shareholders in the business when it was corporatised.) He became chairman of CricInfo Ltd towards the end of 2001, after a financial near-death experience saw the departure of Dr King from the company and the retrenchment of a large number of its staff, including me.

Badminton fanatic Dan Chien began noticing a change in his shuttlecocks a few months ago. The feathers seemed thinner and his shuttlecocks were falling apart at an alarming rate.

- opening paragraph of article by Jia Rui-Chong (LA Times), via Lexington Herald, 31.7.06

The H5N1 virus is posing a threat worldwide to the sport of badminton. The Guardian gives us a rundown of the situation, while NBC11.com explores the economic impact on the shuttlers of El Monte, California.

Meanwhile, National Geographic News reports the diagnosis of the related but less virulent H11 virus in three Iowa people.

And before we go this evening, a late football result:

The full-time score from next round’s Serie B match in Turin:

Juventus 0 Lazio 1.

Red card for Zizou.

Big day on Norton Street.

V for Italia.

With Portugal’s loss to the referee in yesterday’s Euro 2006 semi-final, my interest in the tournament has drawn to a close.

My prediction for the big game on Sunday morning: Portugal 2 Germany 1. And on Monday, France 3 Italy 0 with riot police throwing a cordon around Michel’s Patisserie in Norton Plaza for the rest of the day.

Another domain name I bought a while back and never got around to using.

I’ve put worldcup-champions.com up for auction on eBay. The auction closes in three days time, on Thursday about twelve hours after the Portugal-France semi-final. The domain name is currently registered until 24 February 2007.
If anyone is interested, the auction is on eBay here.

I haven’t been this excited about a game of soccer since… well, no, I haven’t.

Australia 2 Croatia 2. What a nailbiter. We’re in the final sixteen.

Italy? Doddle.

This card costs ’cause you aren’t supposed to have it’

(Darren Rovell/ESPN.com, 2.5.06)

What a fiasco. How did Kansas City Royals rookie Alex Gordon get his face onto a baseball rookie card when the MLBPA says he hasn’t met the eligibility criteria to qualify to appear on one?

An extraordinary situation in Chittagong on Sunday when police used excessive force to stop a press photographer from entering a cricket arena, followed with a sit-down protest by his colleagues on the pitch, delaying the start of the match between Bangladesh and Australia. This, followed by further clashes between the police and the journalists, putting one reporter in hospital in a coma.

I’m covering this story extensively in my cricket blog. If you’re interested in this rather unlikely attack on the working media, I’ll see you there.

Spare a thought for the Australia Post philatelic division. Having bitten the bullet in 2000 and deciding to issue a postage stamp featuring every Australian gold medallist at the Sydney Games, they have now stretched their policy to include the Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games.

That’s sixty-seven new stamps and counting at M2006. I’d been wondering which of Our Jana’s sullen expressions was going to grace her 50 cent stamp, but instead we get an image which only vaguely looks like her.

But harking back to Torino 2006 for a minute, we can at least hold our heads high with the knowledge that Australia is the first country to feature a spyware millionaire on one of its stamps. Word of warning however: for the Aussie Dale Begg-Smith stamp to stick to the envelope, you have to spit on the reverse side…