NEW YORK: With the World Cup Cricket 2007 underway, it was the perfect time for the launch of Crickethook.com, a web 2.0 community for cricket fans.

Cricket enthusiasts the world over can write blogs, post videos, discuss their favorite teams and players, conduct polls and create schedules to invite friends to watch the matches. Cricket players can also form local teams and join leagues, or just watch the games online.

A sample of postings include a video of Borat, (a character from a recent hit movie) playing cricket and a poll asking users to vote who they think will win the World Cup.

Sachin Tendulkar, a well regarded player, has a fan club in the community and anyone can form such groups and fan clubs. Growing fast since its launch, this community is set to soon become a popular website. Cricket, being one of the most watched and played sports in the world, is greatly in need of such an online community, according to Sudhakar Raja who launched the website as part of his online community portal, CommunityHooks. Raja thinks his site differs from MySpace or Facebook.

"MySpace and FaceBook are places where the focus is on the 'Individual', in CommunityHooks, the focus is on the 'Purpose' of the community, which in this case is cricket. People who become part of this community are here to write blogs and meet fellow Cricket fans. Sankara Eye Foundation, Cnetwork (a Chinese business community), India Community Center and SAP Alumni have all started their own communities in California so their fans can interact, collaborate and network with like minded individuals." Sudhakar Raja further says, "I was a cricket enthusiast until I came to the US and this is one way for me to get back into the game.

I formerly worked at Oracle where we had a team that played cricket every weekend and I know of several such teams in other companies as well. These teams need a place where they can post their schedule, find players who may want to join a league and promote their games to bring in spectators. Imagine local cricket matches played in cities such as San Francisco or Chennai that are recorded and uploaded to CricketHook so the world can watch them.

That is powerful." Raja adds that people who come to the website have a common purpose and know they will find other enthusiasts like themselves who have a passion for the sport. The live CricketHook.com community can be found at: www.crickethook.com.