olympics – The BillBlog

August 10, 2008

Olympic Gold

I don’t really care about the Olympics, but thought I’d have a look to see how well the broadcasters were doing with their online coverage. Having spotted this interesting comment on news.com I followed the link, installed the latest Silverlight, restarted my browser and…

So good to see the IOC understands the global importance of sport… and making money out of it.

July 31, 2008

I saw this…

Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us:

Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet – the only sensible option…
Reporters sans frontières – Beijing Games 2008 – Advice from RSF
Test: Silicon Swings and Silicon Roundabouts – read and digest before taking any action
Cory Doctorow: Filesharing deal will drive swapping underground | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Cory speaks the truth, but underestimates just how painful, protracted and destructive the battle will be.
Media face web censorship at Beijing Olympics | Sport | guardian.co.uk – Indeed

July 30, 2008

My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 23rd through July 30th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 23rd and July 30th:

Web curbs for Olympic journalists – What a surprise…
Plenty of Blame to Go Around in Yahoo Music Shutdown – Ed Felten knows who to blame, and I agree with him entirely.
Exploit code targets Mac OS X, iTunes, Java, Winzip… – nasty little piece of software called Evilgrade that uses a man in the middle attack to exploit automatic update code.
Consultation on legislative options to address illicit P2P file-sharing – BERR – UK government consultation opens..
How to make our newspapers profitable again: David Aaronovitch Simulator | The Wardman Wire – ah, how entertaining…
Google Knol is evil | Seldo.Com Blog – Hard-hitting analysis: is Knol Google's 'IE vs Netscape' moment?
Rocque London Index Map – Useful for anyone reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, especially The System of the World
AWS Service Health Dashboard – Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008 – "With a large number of servers gossiping and failing while gossiping, Amazon S3 wasn't able to successfully process many customer requests" Excellent explanation, and good communication with customers
xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe – Ah yes… 🙂
Ofcom report into Social networking usage – some reading for us all I think
DRM still sucks: Yahoo Music going dark, taking keys with it – And yet the music industry wants ISPs and government to sustain their broken business model…
Announcing the Open Web Foundation – Open Web Foundation – Could be useful
Read Giles Coren's letter to Times subs | Media | guardian.co.uk – I didn't expect to, but I agree with him
Cuomo strong-arms Comcast over Usenet | The Iconoclast – politics, law, and technology – CNET News.com – Nice analysis of a dangerous tactic
MySQL forks: could Drizzle be the next of the new generation of relational database? | O'Reilly News – Seeing a major system fork is like watching close friends divorce. Wish them both well…

July 30, 2008

Watching the Olympics

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website – and it seems the story is already moving on, with reports that press access to the net will be filtered by the Chinese]

I won’t be going to Beijing for the Olympic Games next month, and in fact I probably won’t even be going to London in 2012 when it’s our turn to host the festivities.

I don’t watch athletics or any of the other events that will be taking place. I don’t support a football team either, or have much interest in cricket despite being an English male. Sport just doesn’t excite me at all.

But even though I don’t care which country wins most gold medals or whether world records are broken for running, jumping or throwing odd-shaped objects, I’ll be watching what goes on around the Olympic Games with keen interest, because this world-wide sporting event offers a fascinating perspective on the state of the internet today.

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