Earlier, it was cricinfo.com, which was blasting away with short ads on ESPN-Star Sports. Then it was followed up by that scricket.com which was ubiquitous on Sony Max during the Youth World Cup as a bug on the screen.

To be sure, the tack may have attracted eyeballs to their site during the burst but their managers have not really gone to town about the increase in the number of eyeballs they have attracted.

Consider what happens during the biggest of the sports events in the US - the Super Bowl: Media Metrix figures show that two Super Bowl advertisers OurBeginning.com and MicroStrategy.com saw their traffic leapfrogging 989 per cent and 5,000 per cent following their Super Bowl ads. Computer.com gained 150,000 unique users after its ad ran. It gained all of these users in just one day as it launched on that day.

As a grouping the sites which used the Super Bowl as an advertising vehicle notched up a 38.5 per cent growth in traffic on the two days that the ads were bombarded on television. Dot com advertisers on the Super Bowl apart, even regular sports sites saw increases in traffic of 18 per cent on Sunday compared to the previous Sunday. Clearly, making the site's administrators drool.

Network television channel ABC, which ran the game on television and also used its site to provide real time statistics and info on the game got 650,000 visitors. Dataquest says that some 27 million adults were surfing web and simultaneously watching television in 1999 against 8 million in 1998. Wonder how many Indians do both at the same time? This writer has at least done both only a couple of times after he became a Web fanatic in October 1996.

But according to Dataquest, 82 per cent of television-Internetters have the TV on as background noise at least once a week. These individuals point out that they used the Internet to get information around a story and getting sports information while watching a game. Around half of them use the web to interact with a TV show online.

The American Internet User Survey in the last quarter of 1999 said that 10.2 million people surfed the Web and watched TV simultaneously. Almost one-quarter (24 per cent) are doing so during sporting events. Good enough numbers for advertisers to tie up with web sites.

More specifically, the sports sites. Will Indian Internetters also react similarly to the US experience? Hopefully they will and many more Indian companies will take a similar tack to bring their products to life online.

Ask Jeeves reprimanded
It was waiting to happen. Search engine Ask Jeeves has got a rap on its knuckles from the literary agents of P.G. Woodhouse for pinching the name of one of the best English writers' creations without taking permission. The agents say that Bertie Wooster's valet has come to represent all that is reliable and unflappable. And that using the name Jeeves is a violation of a trademark and a copyright infringement by the 1.2 billion company. The company will have to think real quickly and probably come up with a few million dollars as settlement or take on the literary agents in court.Should the company Ask Jeeves?

Billion pages bloom on web
There are a billion pages on the Web. That's the pronouncement of Inktomi and NEC Research Institute. Inktomi says that there are 6,409,521 servers with mirror servers accounting for 1,457,946. That makes the number of unique servers total up to 4,951,247. And guess what a lot of them are unreachable. The duo found that 733,923 were unreachable over 10 days. Webmasters are you worried?

Additionally, 55 per cent of URLs end in .com, while 7.82 per cent end with the net suffix. 6.69 per cent of them have the .edu ending while 4.35 per cent of end with .org, 1.15 per cent use .gov and 0.17 per cent end in .mil.

And we all knew this: 86.55 per cent of the www is in English with French constituting 2.36 per cent. Hey when will the Indian languages start figuring here? If the government has its way and if entrepreneurs see the light, Hindi would likely figure along with Chinese as amongst the Top three.

The author is developing a vertical portal http://www.indiantelevision.com. Reach him at television@vsnl.com and television@hotmail.com