Step-by-Step guide to Facebook Conversion Tracking

Step 1: Once you log in to your ‘Ads Manager’ tab, click on the Conversion Tracking button on the left side bar.

Step 2: Then click on the ‘Create Conversion Pixel’ tab to begin the process.

Step 3: You will be directed to this pop-up, which will ask you for a:

1. Name: An appropriate name will help you remember what you are tracking. (Example: Lead Generation – GATE Ad)

2. Category: This will help you decide the type of action that you want to track on your site. You can choose from the following:

1. Checkouts

2. Registrations

3. Leads

4. Key Page Views

5. Adds to Cart

6. Other Website Conversions

(For the purpose of this example, we have selected ‘Leads’).

Step 4: You will be able to see a pop-up window with a JavaScript code. This is the code that you will have to add to the page where the conversion will happen. This will let you track the conversions back to ads which you are running on Facebook.

The code should be placed on the page that a user will finally see when the transaction is complete.

Here is the tricky part. The code should not go on all pages. For that matter, it should not even go to the landing page of your product. The code should be placed on the page that a user will finally see when the transaction is complete.

For Example: If you want to track when students register for your GATE coaching, paste the code on the registration confirmation page/thank you page and not on the form that they need to submit.

How do you confirm that your conversion is working properly?

1. Check that the javascript snippet has been placed on the correct conversion page. Visit the page where the pixel has been embedded, right click and go to ‘View Page Source’ to find the pixel. The code should have the tag of the HTML. See image below.

2. Check that Facebook is receiving the conversion events from your website. Go to the conversion tracking tab in your Ads Manager account. There you will see a list of the conversion tracking pixels that you have created. If the conversion tracking pixel has been successfully implemented and a conversion event has been recorded, it will be reflected in the Pixel Status column. If the status shows active, it means that the page which contains the pixel has been viewed by users. If it shows inactive, it means that over the last 24 hours, the page with the pixel has not been viewed.

3.Later, when you  create your Facebook ad , you need to check the track conversions box under the campaign, pricing and schedule tab to enable tracking.

Social Gestures and the Social Web – Part I

FROM the Below Article was Copied from the website http://blog.engag.io/2012/04/15/social-gestures-and-the-social-web-part-i/

The Original Author – MR.  William Mougayar

Social Gesturing is at the heart of the social web. Those little signals have a small footprint but a large impact.

The crowd-sourced nature of social gestures adds up to a lot of value. After all, Facebook with all its might was mostly based and founded on 3 basic social gestures: liking, sharing and linking, each taking a fraction of a second to accomplish.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hierarchy of social gestures in terms of value and potential.  And I came-up with the following way to organize them into a taxonomy where certain gestures are grouped with each other according to the objective they are meant to achieve and the purpose they target: People, Interests or Content.

The graph below is self-explanatory. The objective of social gesturing is to a) grab Attention, b) Express yourself, c) Curate interests (or content), d) develop Relationships, or e) Engage with people.

The most commonly used Social Gestures are Sharing, Linking and Liking when it comes to Content, and Following or Friending when it comes to People. But the area that holds the most promise is Engagement with People.

There is an ascending amount of time it takes to accomplish each gesture. If you look at the two extremes, Discussing something with someone is a lot more time-consuming than Clicking on content or Sharing it.

Personally, and for Engagio, I’m very interested in the gestures around Social Engagement. I think we’re just getting started in that segment, and I plan to cover more on that topic in Part II of this post.

In the meantime, what is your opinion on the following 3 questions:

• Are there other Social Gestures that you are seeing?

• Do you see new ones that are emerging?

• Which ones do you use the most?

Related articles

• Engagio: A Canadian Startup Story and the future of the Social Web (startupnorth.ca)
• Engagio wants to be your one-stop social inbox (gigaom.com)
• How to swear in Italian (afrahm.wordpress.com)
• Don’t Export Your American Hand Gestures [Infographic] (communicationstudies.com)
• ShadowPuppets prototype lets you pinch-to-zoom, click, and scroll with shadow gestures (theverge.com)

Engagio: Recognize & Build Relationships On Social Network Easily

Engagio helps you to track your online conversations and allows you to develop meaningful relationships from them. In short, it is your tool to find quality relationships.

Pitched as ‘Your inbox for online conversations and relationships’, it is a tool much like Gmail, but is for managing your conversations in social networking sites and commenting systems. Engagio gives you visibility about the people behind these conversations and reveals their social identities profile. It saves you much time and allows you to connect with others in a much better and deeper way.

Although social media has many advantages, sometimes we fall short of managing our many relationships on social networking sites. With so many friends, family members, colleagues, classmates and relatives in our contacts list, we miss out on building quality relationships with people who matter. Engagio helps you to do that and more.

Engagio believes that commenting and conversations are strong social signals. They are stronger than likes, shares and links. Comments are implicit linkages about people. After all, you only care to comment on somebody’s post and take time to do it when you like that person or what s/he has to say. Like is easy, commenting takes time and thought. Engagio studies all that and more, and give you full visibility into the potential relationships behind your comments and conversations.

The service is frictionless and derives implicit data from your normal, everyday interactions. It does not matter whether your conversations are on social networks or inside your Engagio inbox, Engagio tracks them all. You connect to your social networks and Engagio starts to track, record, analyze and report on your interaction activity.

All you need to do is to signup from the entry page or jump to your inbox. You can easily track your conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Disqus-enabled sites, Hacker news comments, Foursquare and more. This is a wonderful service for everybody who wishes to build up on great relationships without putting in much time and effort.

Chat With Command Prompt

If you want personal chat with a friend

you don’t need to download any yahoo messenger
All you need is your friends IP address and Command Prompt.

Firstly, open Notepad and enter:

@echo off

:A

Cls

echo MESSENGER

set /p n=User:

set /p m=Message:

net send %n% %m%

Pause

Goto A

Now save this as “Messenger.bat”. Open the .bat file and in Command

Prompt you should see:

MESSENGER

User:

After “User” type the IP address of the computer you want to contact.

After this, you should see this:

Message:

Now type in the message you wish to send.Before you press “Enter” it should look like this:

MESSENGER

User:27.192.168.1.88

Message: Hello SoftIT!

Now all you need to do is press “Enter”, and start chatting!

Mobile Trading

The Procyon Holdings (PROHD) name is expanding again as we push out into another development area — the Android framework. When I abandoned my BlackBerry, the choice to move to the Android platform was an easy decision. Market saturation, the development community, and fluidity between devices make this platform shine.

I’ve been having a few end user problems with the current iteration of our trading website. First, the native Android Gingerbread browser lacks SVG support, an issue that has bewildered me since I read about it. I can solve this issue by using another browser such as Opera, but I would like to use the native one.

Also working with a HTML + Ajax website on a device with a touch interface feels like you are not getting the full user experience. I want to scroll down lists with my finder, click and hold to expose options, and speed around menus.

Mobile Architecture

We had to expand our design and create a few new pieces to get data to the mobile world. New items include the creation of a daemon to simply database population, exposing data via XML, and working with an existing library to enable Push notifications.

Information Flow

The Daemon runs on our server, periodically pulls transactions from the Eve API, and places that information in our wallet table.

Our previous design was that you would have to hit the transactions webpage and it would trigger an update. Getting a page to refresh on a desktop connected via broadband versus a mobile phone is quite the different experience.

Android has a framework called C2DM(Android Cloud to Device Messaging) which enables you to send lightweight push notifications to devices.

Our vision is that when a sell order clears, a large/special sale has occurred, or a significant milestone has been reached, we send a notice. This will be visible on phone’s Status Notification Bar and cause me to act if deemed important. I have been forgetting to buy or trade a particular item after the sell orders have cleared. Forget things — loose profit.

Getting data out of our database required the creation of a webservice to produce XML output from our wallet table.

Here is an example of the sale of one item in our XML feed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>  
<TransactionList>  
<Transaction>  
<transactionDateTime>2012-04-19 06:21:04</transactionDateTime>  
<typeID>21096</typeID>  
<typeName>Cynosural Field Generator I</typeName>  
<quantity>1</quantity>  
<price>1948939.91</price>  
<profit>147803</profit>  
<stationName>STATION</stationName>  
<icon>21096_32.png</icon>  
</Transaction>  
</TransactionList>

Alpha Screenshot

This screenshot is our first proof of concept. We’re able to get information from an XML feed, display it, and get/cache images from the Eve image server. Major credit goes to my trading and corporation partner James, who has been doing the development work and educating me on the Android framework.

There is a lot we want to do with the mobile version. Menus, tabs, charts, reports, and the ability to add items to a shopping cart/wish list are all things on the drawing board.

Future Collaboration

This project is our first exposure to the Android framework and after the initial learning curve, we might perhaps coolabrate with the Aideron Robotics team on Aura. So maybe some of our trading mechanics will make their way into the Aura application.

Getting the Distance between Locations using Google Maps API

Modifying my post on drawing directions in a MapView using Google's API, I have come up with a solution to get the distance between two locations. Considering the same example I modified getDirections() to the method given below which returns distance as a string in kms(or meters).

public String getDistance(double lat1, double lon1, double lat2, double lon2) {
	String result_in_kms = "";
	String url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/directions/xml?origin=" + lat1 + "," + lon1 + "&destination=" + lat2 + "," + lon2 + "&sensor=false&units=metric";
	String tag[] = {"text"};
	HttpResponse response = null;
	try {
		HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
		HttpContext localContext = new BasicHttpContext();
		HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);
		response = httpClient.execute(httpPost, localContext);
		InputStream is = response.getEntity().getContent();
		DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
		Document doc = builder.parse(is);
		if (doc != null) {
			NodeList nl;
			ArrayList args = new ArrayList();
			for (String s : tag) {
				nl = doc.getElementsByTagName(s);
				if (nl.getLength() > 0) {
					Node node = nl.item(nl.getLength() - 1);
					args.add(node.getTextContent());
				} else {
					args.add(" - ");
				}
			}
			result_in_kms = String.format("%s", args.get(0));
		}
	} catch (Exception e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
	return result_in_kms;
}

How to get more page views for your blog

“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we’ve been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of almost 100,000 blogs to perform a regression analysis. Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations. We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggests that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow – It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post, or see your post in their reader, there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Comments, Comments, Comments – The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; holding all else equal, every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: ”have you ever done X?”; “do you think Y is acceptable?”. You can read some more thoughts on how to build your audience  and how to get more comments.

Post Frequently and Regularly – Your readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals. (The Daily Post can help with ideas, as can the advice on how to get more traffic)

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook (using Publicize), for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!

Google to bring cheap Android tablets

The internet giant is reportedly set to launch a sub-Rs 10,000 tablet later this year.

Google has said that it will focus more on lower end tablets.

“There’s been a lot of success on some lower-priced tablets that run Android, maybe not the full Google version of Android, but we definitely believe that there is going to be a lot of success at the lower end of the market. It’s definitely an area we think is important and we’re quite focused on,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive officer, was reported as saying.

Currently, there are a lot of cheap Android tablets in the market but these are mostly from lesser known manufacturers.

Google’s direct involvement in low cost Android tablets could be revolutionary. In fact, the online giant is reportedly set to launch a sub $200 (Rs 10,000) device this year itself. The tablet is said to have a 7 inch display with Android 4.0 operating system, a quad core processor, and WiFi for internet access.

Social Media Integration

Spotify & Social Media

Spotify music applications offer easy integration with a large variety of different, popular social media channels. With their user-friendly applications, integrating your music lifestyle into your previously established social media channels is fairly simple. Such social media channels that your Spotify application can integrate with are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. As of this year, Spotify was completely redesigned in order to fully and completely integrate into both Facebook and Twitter accounts. The new application also has fully functioning/interactive applications, embedded into its database structure, such as last.fm, billboard.com, and Sounddrop.

Some of the key features of this fully-integrated platform offer sharing and tracking functions with your automatically-synchronized social media friends. Such functions include tracking what your friends are listening to, discovering  what sort of music and playlists are “trending”, as well as even  collaborating on shared playlists with other friends or users. These social media integration features have become such a vital part of this new social experience (i.e. Spotify) that new users are required to have a Facebook or Twitter account in order to complete registration of the service.

Last but not least, this marriage between Spotify and Facebook has also brought upon a little reverse-integration to the pairing. This reverse-integration comes from the recent addition and invention of a fully-functioning Spotify music application embedded on the Facebook website server.

Billa II – Teaser Promo

Ajith is back with Billa II after the successful 2007 flick Billa which was directed by Vishnuvardhan. Expected to release on 25th May, Billa II is supposed to be a prequel to Billa ( unlike Don-2 which was a sequel ) and talks about how David, an ordinary man from coastal Tamil Nadu becomes the dreaded don Billa. Directed by Chakri Toleti  and also starring Parvathy Omanakuttan, Bruna Abdullah, Vidyut Jamwal and Sudhanshu Pandey in supporting roles who all make their debut in Tamil cinema, the film has music by Yuvan Shankar Raja and R.D.Rajasekharis the DOP.

Expected to be the big ticket summer Tamil release, watch this interesting teaser for now.

ORU KAL ORU KANNADI – REVIEW

RED GIANT MOVIES UDHAYANIDHI STALIN PRESENTS:

ORU KAL ORU KANNADI****

A Movie Story & Directed by Rajesh M who has done the film neatly in commercial and full of comedy.
The producer Udhayanidhi himself is the Hero of the film with Santhanam making full comedy. Heroine is Hansika, Saranya Ponvanna Udhayanidhi mother, Uma Padbhanan Hansika’s mother and father is Shiyaji Shinde. With varadha rajan and others.

From the beginning itself the movie moves in the comedy track and full of comedy mixed with stunts, songs in foreign locations. Songs are all good, music by Harris Jayraj, Camera Balasubramniam, Lyrics Na Muthukumar, Arts: Jacy, Choreography: Dinesh, Stunts Rajasekar, Editing Vivek Harshan PRO: Nikil

Very neatly and in commercial and comedy fully with excellent timings by both Udyanidhi and santhanam speaks about the story. Udhayanidhi being produced many films is hero in this and does not looks like a new actor and done his part in very good manner with Hansika a beauty fitted perfectly for the Hero.

An wonderful comedy mixed commercial movie with all credits.

Kumar srinivas
Photo/video journalist

Related articles

• Oru Kal Oru Kannadi (5inetune.com)
• Audio Beat: Oru Kal Oru Kannadi (thehindu.com)
• Shot Cuts: Woman power (thehindu.com)
• Hansika Motwani says she is not a snob (ibnlive.in.com)
• The Blacks Only Comedy Show is back! (jasonvonberg.wordpress.com)

Explore the REST API

I have had the pleasure of working with the WordPress.com REST API over the past few weeks and am very excited to start “dogfooding” this resource everywhere I can.

One cool feature is that all the endpoints are self-documenting. In fact, the documentation for the REST API is built by the API itself! With this information we were able to build a console to help debug and explore the various resources that are now available through the new API. So let me introduce you to the new REST console for WordPress.com.

A word of caution: the console is only available when you are logged into WordPress.com and is hooked up to the live system, so be careful with your POST requests!

At its simplest you can supply the method, path, query, and body for the resource you wish to examine (it’s pre-populated with /me). Press “Submit” to see the response status for your request and an expandable JSON object that you can explore. All links listed under meta are active, so click one to make another request.

To get a better idea of what kind of parameters a request can take, select it under the “Reference” section. It will then provide an interface with some contextual help to let you know which path, query, and body parameters it accepts, what each of those parameters are for, and a field for you to provide the value.

Related articles

• Explore the REST API (developer.wordpress.com)
• How to analyze your Blog Traffic using WordPress Stats API (selvabalaji.wordpress.com)
• Apigee v2 Console: Making learning APIs as simple as possible, but not simpler (apigee.com)
• Phasing out old API, upgrade your WordPress plugins! (flattr.net)
• REST easy with JIRA 5 (blogs.atlassian.com)

ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 – Crowning Glory for India

The 2011 Cricket World Cup tournament lit up our TV screens with high quality play, absolute rubbish, highlights, lowlights, pluck, timidity and a mass of other notables. Here are some of the things The Daily Maverick can praise, bewail and argue about.

Hosts winning

While we may be pretty serious fans of cricket, and sport in general, in South Africa, we are nowhere near as obsessive about it as India. The Indian team’s victory in the Final in front of their own blaring fans in their premier city is one of the most romantic scripts that could be written for the game. That they did it with a South African coach added to the gut-warming feeling we were permitted as the news channels broadcast one happy Indian fan after another.

Plucky cricket

Two teams at the tournament showed that talent isn’t the sole ingredient for success. New Zealand and Ireland both showed what a bit of grit, pressurising fielding and counter-attacking mentality can achieve. Ireland came from behind to beat England and chased down a massive Dutch score, and New Zealand knocked out South Africa when a betting man (who had never seen South Africa play in a knockout match before) would have put all of his money on the Proteas.

Umpiring

This was the first World Cup to feature the Umpire Decision Review System and has finally meant that we have statistical evidence to see which of the umpires are the best. In a show of initiative not seen since they last decided to disagree with whatever the BCCI said, the ICC actually removed the underperforming Asoka de Silva from important World Cup fixtures after he hashed a few games. Marais Erasmus, South Africa’s representative at the tournament, had a good run and, to our knowledge, only had one decision overturned.

Photo: Cricket fans celebrate in New Delhi, after India won the ICC Cricket World Cup final match against Sri Lanka, April 2, 2011. India sparked wild celebrations among their billion supporters after beating Sri Lanka by six wickets in the World Cup final at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium on Saturday. REUTERS/B Mathur.

---

The Bad

---

South Africa

It was a familiar sight to see South Africa return to Mzansi within a day of their first knockout fixture. After the farcical 1992 semi-final, the Proteas have managed to cock up the quarters in 1996, the tied semi in 1999, semis in 2009 and 2011. Add to that the fire-spittingly haemorrhaging 2003 “knockout” game against Sri Lanka and you’ll see why SA cricket fans have earned the right to government-subsidised anti-depressants.

The West Indies
We didn’t need a reminder, but we had confirmation that the swashbuckling days of swaggering batsmen and giant fast-bowlers are completely over. The West Indies folded meekly against South Africa, England, India and in the quarter-final against Pakistan. Watching Darren Sammy bowl his dibbly-dobblies at first change for the team that once produced skull- and toe-crunching bowlers like Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner and Curtly Ambrose was worse than sad.

The Final toss

The toss circus in the Final was a good indication that the odd batsman walking does not a dignified sport make, nor does the presence of a match-referee actually serve a purpose in a cricket match. If the game was what we wanted it to be, MS Dhoni could have just asked Kumar Sangakkarra what he had called and we all could have moved on. Had the match referee, the same one who wanted Sri Lanka batting in the dark in the 2007 Final, paid any sort of attention this could also have been avoided.

Photo: New Zealand’s wicket keeper Brendon McCullum (L) runs out South Africa’s AB de Villiers (R) during their Cricket World Cup quarter-final match in Dhaka March 25, 2011. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi.

---

The Unexpected

---

England

England usually fall over flat and die in the group stages of World Cups or they do very well throughout. England qualified for the Final in 1987 and 1992 (losing to Australia and Pakistan respectively) but then crashed out in the group stage of the 1996, 1999 and 2003 tournaments. This year’s Cricket World Cup had an England which managed to lose to Ireland and Bangladesh, beat South Africa, scrape a win against the Netherlands and tie with India. The Empire XI showcased one of the best batsmen of the tournament (Jonathan Trott), the innings of the tournament (Andrew Strauss’ 158 vs India), the bowling spells of the tournament (Stuart Broad’s 4/15 vs South Africa) and yet England were sent packing by Sri Lanka in the quarter-finals.

Robin Peterson

We humbly admit we had no faith in Robin Peterson when he was selected in the SA World Cup squad. We thought he had only been brought as cover for Imran Tahir and Johan Botha, and he would only get a game if one of them did themselves in. How incredibly wrong we were. With sporting pitches, Peterson was South Africa’s most successful bowler in the tournament, picking up 15 wickets at an average of 15, and he only went for 4.25 an over. Incredible stuff. He was the second most penetrative spinner and the fourth highest wicket-taker overall.

---

Team of the tournament

---

Absolutely the most contentious part of any World Cup review, this is our team of the tournament:

• Sachin Tendulkar
• TM Dilshan
• Jonathan Trott
• Kumar Sangakkara (c)
• Yuvraj Singh
• Mahela Jayawardene
• Mohammad Hafeez
• Shahid Afridi
• Zaheer Khan
• Tim Southee
• Ray Price/Dale Steyn
• 12th man: AB de Villiers

Tendulkar and Dilshan are no-brainer selections. Trott makes it in on sheer weight of runs, which he scored at a strike rate of more than 80. Yuvraj was man of the tournament as his scoring was up there with the best and he chipped in with 15 wickets with what look like left-arm spinners to us, but are evidently scud-missiles when one is holding a bat at 20m.

Photo: Sri Lanka’s captain and wicketkeeper Kumar Sangakkara speaks with Muttiah Muralitharan, who is playing in his last Cricket World Cup, after their team beat New Zealand in their ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 semi-final match in Colombo March 29, 2011. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte.

We know we left out Dhoni, the World Cup winning captain who turned the Final around India’s way, but his batting throughout the tournament wasn’t so hot. Sangakkara’s blade was far more consistent. He is paired in the middle order with Mahela Jayawardene who scored two centuries in the World Cup, including that delicious knock in the Final.

Mohammad Hafeez sneaks in ahead of Ajantha Mandis because of his superb economy rate of 3.5 and his ability to bat. He isn’t a great batsman, and his constant opening says more about Pakistan’s depth than it does about his skills. If we picked Mendis then Afridi would come in at number seven and we think that’s a place too early. We prefer Hafeez there.

Ray Price also sneaked in because of his economy rate, but his selection would be dependent on the wicket. If it suited pace bowlers Dale Steyn would come in for him. Price is an incredible player. He bowls left-arm spin with the new ball for a team that gets walloped every time it plays someone decent. To have an economy rate below 3.5 in any context is superb. While representing Zimbabwe, it is super-human.

Tim Southee and Zaheer Khan were far and away the top fast bowlers of the tournament. Southee has found an extra bit of pace which, coupled with his bounce, snagged him 18 wickets in eight games. To put that into perspective, he never took more than three wickets in a match – underlying his consistency. Compare that to Malinga – if you take away his six-wicket haul against Kenya he only took seven wickets at 33.

---

2015

---

A decent tournament recipe has finally been found. The complicated Super 6 and Super 8 varieties were tossed out and a round-robin format resulting in knockouts was adopted. If any tinkering were done further, we would recommend removing two of the minnow teams – Canada, Kenya and the Netherlands didn’t add much to the tournament – and hastening up the group stage by playing more than one fixture a day. The group stage in this tournament took longer than the entire FIFA World Cup did last year.

Only four years to go until the next one… DM

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• What are opinions on which team will win the 2011 Cricket World Cup (wiki.answers.com)
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India look for a repeat

– Hockey world cup
-Hosts have a job at hand today vs Aussies

JAYDEEP BASU

Fresh from their mind-boggling victory over Pakistan, India have yet another big match to play in Pool B when they take on the mighty Australians in the hockey World Cup on Tuesday.

India coach Jose Brasa has been talking about this match from the day the draw for the World Cup was released.

“We are in a tough group and the Australians are the biggest hurdle,” he said. “If they continue to perform the way they did in the Champions Trophy in Melbourne, then very few would be able to stop them from winning the title,” he said.

The Australians are perennial favourites for the title and certainly the most compact team in the tournament.

Sunday’s unexpected defeat against England makes them even more dangerous as they can be expected to go flat out to grab full points against India and stay in contention for a last four berth.

As such, India can expect a bruising and somewhat physical encounter against a team whose line-up is the envy of all. With FIH Player of the Year Jamie Dwyer leading from the front and the likes of Eddie Ockenden and Des Abbot for support, the Aussies pack the kind of punch that can knock out any opponent.

“It’s going to be a difficult match,” admitted Brasa. “They lost to England, but then England are a vastly improved team, working very hard for the London Olympics in 2012.”

To make matters more difficult for India, Australia coach Ric Charlesworth could well be looking forward to the match in order to prove a point. Last year, after being appointed technical director of Indian hockey, the revered coach was forced to leave following a bitter tiff with the authorities. Charlesworth so far has not said anything publicly but he would certainly not be in a charitable mood for the clash.

The Indian camp, however, was hardly worried. “We have just won a big game that has really boosted our confidence,” said India captain Rajpal Singh.

Rajpal Singh ,Jamie Dwyer

“Our team, I am sure, will continue to perform smoothly in the rest of the matches. Australia, too, are vulnerable, England have shown it on the opening day. We are not going to yield even an inch without a fight.”

Having won 51 of their 72 World Cup outings, Australia boast of a win-loss ratio of 71 per cent — higher than any other team.

Not only that, the team were runners-up in the last two editions and given the statistics Brasa has advised his boys to not get carried away by the triumph against Pakistan.

As for Australia, Charlesworth himself has acknowledged that Tuesday’s tie is a must-win match for his team.

The last match time the two teams met was in the Champions Trophy, five years back in Chennai, when Australia won 4-1.

Australia have come here on the back of their Champions Trophy triumph at home last year and the team are being seen as one of the title contenders. The Aussies are ranked No.2 in the world.

History, too, favours Australia with the Indians having won just one of the six World Cup matches involving the two sides.

Social Media is a Contact Sport

Every now and then I come across people who lament their small following on Twitter, lack of comments on Facebook, and low number of connections on LinkedIn. Yet, these same people don’t post tweets, update their status, comment on blogs, nor make an effort to network with professional connections. Think of social media as a contact sport that requires energy. Merely sitting on the bench does not make allstars. As with any sport, the rewards are reaped after much practice and some effort.

So, go out there and participate in the conversations. Here are just some suggestions to help you get started:

On Twitter

Follow people and some will follow you.

• Use Twitter Search to look for folks with interests relevant to you
• Follow bloggers who interest you
• Follow some friends of your followers
• Follow who your followers follow

Ask questions

• One of the most useful words around is “help.”

Help others

• Take the opportunity to help someone solve a problem.

On Facebook

• Post status updates
• Comment on friends’ status updates
• Wish someone “Happy Birthday.”

On LinkedIn

• Post status updates
• Comment on your connections’ status updates
• Join LinkedIn groups
• Join discussions and post useful information
• Establish yourself as a thought leader by answering questions posted on LinkedIn’s Answers section.

The key to social media success is participating in the conversations. Reach out to others and they might surprise you. Go on. Get off the bench, out of the sidelines, and join in!

India move to 2nd spot in ODI rankings

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Riding on their nine consecutive ODI victories, MS Dhoni-led Indian team has moved up to the second spot in the latest ICC rankings.

India displaced Australia who slipped to the third position in ODI rankings. India move up after 4 ODI wins against Sri Lanka and Australia’s two consecutive losses against New Zealand.

India have 122 points to be just three points behind World No. 1 South Africa. After thrashing Australia 4-1 in the five-match ODI series, the Proteas clinched the No. 1 position. Australia (121) have been pushed to the third place while Zealand follow on fourth rung with 117 points. Pakistan are fifth while England and Sri Lanka are sixth and seventh respectively.

South Africa and India are also the top challengers to Ricky Ponting’s team in both versions of the game.

In ICC Test Rankings, Australia have 126 points while second placed South Africa is 121 and would get a chance to topple Australia when they take on Ponting’s men in a home series beginning later this month. India are third placed with 118 points.

The number one ODI team on April 1 will be richer by $175,000 with the runners-up getting $75,000.

ICC ODI rankings Opportunity for Australia to reclaim top spot

Australia may have lost their No.1 ranking in ODIs to South Africa after their 39-run defeat in Perth, but they have an opportunity to reclaim that position quickly when their five-match ODI series against New Zealand gets underway.

South Africa went ahead by a fraction of a point after winning the series 4-1, but a victory in the first ODI against New Zealand in Perth, on Sunday, will be enough to push Australia to the top. Australia are still the top Test team, enjoying a five-point lead over South Africa despite losing the Test series 2-1 this summer.

South Africa are back at the top for the first time since April 2008 and held the position for a brief period. The gap between the top three sides is steadily narrowing, with India also in the picture. They are currently five points behind South Africa and Australia in the ODI rankings and a series victory against Sri Lanka will push them further towards the top.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe have also made progress, moving up one place to tenth after winning the opening two matches of the five-ODI series in Kenya.

Team	Matches	Points	Rating
South Africa	34	4245	125
Australia	33	4113	125
India	42	5022	120
New Zealand	27	3041	113
Pakistan	31	3446	111
England	32	3469	108
Sri Lanka	39	4125	106
West Indies	27	2463	91
Bangladesh	38	1731	46
Zimbabwe	29	585	20
Ireland	10	190	19
Kenya	9	11	1

Younis appointed Pakistan captain

Nearly two years after he should’ve taken over, Younis Khan took his place as the captain of Pakistan, after the Pakistan Cricket Board decided to relieve Shoaib Malik of his duties. Younis, who has twice previously turned down the leadership, takes over as Test and ODI captain, his first assignment less than a month away when Sri Lanka return for a two-Test series.

After a night and day of intense speculation, and a day full of meetings, Ijaz Butt, the PCB chairman, confirmed rumours that had begun floating almost as soon as Pakistan trooped off the field after one of their worst ODI defeats to Sri Lanka on Saturday. They were fueled by a 15-minute meeting earlier today between Younis and Butt, in which the offer was first made. There followed meetings between Butt and senior officials from the board and team management at which it is learnt there was clear consensus: Malik had to step down.

“We asked Shoaib Malik to step down as captain. He agreed and only then did we appoint Younis Khan as captain of Pakistan,” Butt told reporters at the Gaddafi Stadium, Lahore. “We have taken the step because our performances weren’t great. The end result is not just winning but the performance. We didn’t just lose to Sri Lanka, we performed poorly. So we have made Younis Khan the captain of both Test and ODI sides.”

No tenure has yet been set for his leadership – “as is the PCB way,” said one official – but there was unanimous approval for the move to replace Malik and bring in Younis. “The feeling was clear that something had to be done because the team had performed so poorly and Younis was the first choice,” an official present at the meetings, said.

Younis has long been seen as the natural choice to lead Pakistan. The impression was built during an impressive two-year reign as vice-captain to Inzamam-ul-Haq, where he often stepped in to take over in sessions and Tests to telling effect. But he blotted his credentials by twice walking away from the post, which in turn led to uncertainty today over whether he would accept.

The first time he had done so was in October 2006, days before the Champions Trophy, when he walked out of a press conference fuming that he didn’t want to be “a dummy captain.” He turned down the post again after the World Cup the following year, though reasons weren’t made clear at the time. But over the course of the year, Younis is said to have changed his views, culminating in the trip to India at the end of the year, where he expressed a desire to captain Pakistan.

It was understood by Cricinfo that Younis was keen to set some terms and conditions for taking over, but it appears that has not been the case. “As far as we are aware, no terms and conditions have been set,” said the official. “The chairman is not the kind of man to qualify an offer. Younis was offered it and he accepted and that is that.”

Malik’s downfall had been on the cards for some time. His win-loss record in ODIs remains impressive but it has been built on weak opposition. Against bigger teams he has been less successful and the resounding nature of the defeats to Sri Lanka sealed the deal. But as much as on-field results, the pressure built on him because of his inability to build a relationship with senior players in the team. Mohammad Yousuf criticised him openly, though he did so only after going to the ICL. Privately, at least two other senior players were also unhappy with his approach and particularly at the clique he is said to have cultivated within the team.

These issues culminated last week with Malik openly questioning Shoaib Akhtar’s commitment during the Sri Lanka series, before u-turning and claiming he had not singled out Shoaib. The episode is said to have greatly incensed the board and though Butt played down reports of a rift, another official hinted it might have been worse than previously thought.

“Many things were discussed in the meetings, including Malik’s relationship with players. Things weren’t great and as an example, during the last ODI in Lahore when the team was staying at the team hotel, Malik stayed at the National Cricket Academy (NCA). Draw what conclusions you want from that.”