Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Missing and inaccurate information on websites

The final results from IRF World Championships are finally on the IRF website, although it's four days after the conclusion of the competition. They confirm what The Racquetball Blog speculated: Bolivia finished second overall in the team competition, which is a fantastic result for them and international racquetball in general.

However, it is troubling that only the top four teams are listed in the results of the team competition, when 25 teams were competing. What was the order for the rest of the teams?

Thus, the IRF site is missing some of the information from Worlds, even four days after the end of the competition. However, the information isn't inaccurate. There is inaccurate information on the USA Racquetball site regarding Worlds.

The USA Racquetball site states "nearly 200 players representing 30 countries competed" at the World Championships. That's incorrect. One hundred and sixteen (116) from 25 countries competed in Ireland. Few people would describe 116 as "nearly 200."

Participation at the Worlds Championships can be found on the R2Sports site for Worlds, which is linked to the USA Racquetball home page. Note, the participant total is listed as 153, but each country's entry in the men's or women's team competition (of which there are 37) is counted in that 153.

The promotion of any event requires the timely distribution of accurate information regarding that event. If information is not distributed quickly, then it fails to be timely and people won't care. If the information distributed is inaccurate, then people will judge the event poorly and everyone associated with it.

To properly promote racquetball events, racquetball organizations need to convey information about those events accurately and in a timely fashion. This may be more important for a small sport like racquetball than big sports, because the big sports have independent media at their events that can get the word out, which racquetball generally doesn't have.

Being an independent media source for racquetball was one of the reasons that The Racquetball Blog was started.

Follow the bouncing ball....

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