Recapping our Predictions for the World Cup or Why Floatingsheep rocks!!

Now that the dust has settled after the world cup it is time to reflect on our predictions. Our language sensitive ranking system based on geo-coded references to football/soccer correctly identified three out of the final four countries in the world cup. The only error was predicting England over Germany. Although one can suspect foul play from the English member of the Floatingsheep collective, there is a methodological explanation as well.


Our searches are limited to land, as there are very few placemarks in water. While this works in a general sense, it does exclude references to football by a country's aquatic citizens. While this is miniscule in most cases, the case of Paul the Octopus suggests that Germany may have a sizeable underground (or better phrased, underwater) population of football enthusiasts that were missed in the data.

Or maybe Mark just cooked the data so England would win. Still you could have done much worse if you used our predictions.

After all, using our system we did make about $17,000 dollars via offshore betting. Unfortunately, we have already spent it all on gumdrops, Botox and aquavit. Clearly we're just not cut out for life in the fast lane.