olympics

The opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing gets underway at midday GMT today, an event that will be broadcast live on television across the world. During the next two weeks, you’ll be hard pressed to avoid seeing and hearing about the Olympic Games whenever you turn on the TV or radio or pick up a newspaper at the newsstand.

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business.

Internet access for reporters covering the Summer Olympics in China suffers the usual blocking instead of the open surfing the press expected to find; they can thank Olympic Committee members for this.

The motto of next year’s Olympic games in China is “one world, one dream.” Online, the world is actually split up into several countries, each with their own limited view, made possible through national censorship of the web.

Though much of the US Olympic performance left sports fans disappointed, the Olympic website has enjoyed a gold medal showing with the use of Flash throughout it.

Today's communication technologies - including cell phones, e-mail, and blogs - can drive users to a heavy sense of guilt.

A query on Google for "NBC Olympics" returns a video link to a two-minute advertisement for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Torino, and an unobvious change to Google's Sponsored Links boxes on top of search results.

Spammer groups have begun using new methods in order to dupe unsuspecting people. Keeping with what's on the surface of popularity, spammers have resorted to including Google and The Olympics within email subject lines in an effort to trick recipients into opening these mailings.