Euro 2008 losers are actually web site winners

FRANCE MAY HAVE left Euro 2008 with its tail between its legs after a humiliating defeat by Italy, but the country still topped the league when it came to having the best sporting web site. For what little consolation that brings.

Watchmouse, a web site performance monitoring outfit, carried out its own nailbiting tournament to find the Euro 2008 nation with the best sport website by fashioning an index which takes into account three parameters; errors, speed (load time) and availability.

The combination of the three measurements was calculated into a Site Availability Index (SPI), which was then broken down into the following groups: SPIs of less than 1,000 ranked 'well performing' sites, 1,001 - 1,999 'acceptable', and scores of over 2,000 losers with 'serious user issues'. Sort of the equivalent of Win, draw, lose, when you think about it.

The way the system works is that Watchmouse's monitoring stations try to access the homepage of each nations' favorite sports site every five minutes. The ‘goal’ is for the sites to download within four seconds without any errors.

The outfit began its rather pointless and frankly time wasting monitoring on 11th June 2008, only to discover that France, Spain and the Netherlands are true champions when it comes to running their sporting websites, while Austria and Turkey score own goals.

Of the 16 monitored sites, France's www.lequipe.fr took the cup for best sports site with an enviably low SPI of 203, counting nil errors, 100 per cent availability and a load time of less than 4 seconds. Superbe. Spain's www.marca.com came in second (Ole!), narrowly defeating the Dutch www.vi.nl (GodVerdomme!).

Turkey’s spor.ekolay.net's poor score was due mainly to its insufferably long load times, but Watchmouse CTO, Mark Pors noted We hope that as we continue monitoring, we'll see Turkey's national sports site improve as dramatically as their game did on Sunday!" For the full league table, see here.µ