NevOn

Never mind the Superbowl, what about the 6 Nations Rugby!

What a tremendous weekend for contact sport!

While every American I know was glued to the TV (or plugged in to the net) yesterday for the Superbowl - in case you didn't know, the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks 21-10 - there was some fantsatic rugby going on in Europe throughout the weekend.

Three matches were played between all the participating nations in the Six Nations Championship - England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales - all of which were broadcast live throughout Europe on one TV station or another.

I managed to watch some of the Scotland vs France game on Sunday on the BBC. What a treat! And what an upset! Scotland beat France 20-16 in a nail-biting game that confounded the pundits' predictions of an easy victory for favourites France.

If you want to get great background into the teams, with interviews and reports, The Six Nations website offers a series of podcasts complete with RSS feeds so you won't miss any content. And for general news and stories throughout the run of this championship - the highlight of the Rugby Union calendar - you can subscribe to seven RSS feeds: six focused on news about each team plus a catch-all feed that gives you everything.

Way to go, London!

Just arrived in London for a meeting later today to be greeted with the news everywhere that the 2012 Olympic Games will be held in London.

As I write this in my hotel room near Hyde Park, some air force jets have just flown over trailing red, white and blue smoke. Terrific!

So London beat Paris. I posted earlier today that it's all happening in France at the moment. Not with this, though. Perhaps M. Chirac shouldn't have criticized British cooking so much ;)

Clarity in communication

Here's a plain-speaking description of a blog commenting policy that no one could possibly misunderstand:

I appreciate everyone who takes the time to comment on the articles I post on this blog. Please understand that unless your comments get read and reviewed by me, they don’t get posted. Some days I literally receive hundreds of comments, and simply can’t get to them all. I read as many as I can, and then delete the rest (both positive and negative). This might not be the best solution, but at least it lets me start fresh during the next day.

No comment gets posted that doesn’t comply with the rules that I have set forth for this blog. You can find those rules in an earlier article. One sure way not to get your comment posted, is to start it with the following sentence, “Bob, I know you won’t post this comment.” Because I have so many comments to look through, when I see this sentence, I agree with the writer and immediately press the delete key.

From Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy.com, on his Hot Points! blog.

GoDaddy.com is at the center of a controversy regarding TV ads during last weekend's Superbowl in the US, one of which was pulled by Fox at the last minute. Some lively discussion about it all on Parsons' blog.

Superbowl advertising is the hot conversation

So the Superbowl happened yesterday. In scanning my RSS feeds this morning, I see that sporting event has occupied the written oupourings of just about the whole blogosphere across the Atlantic.

(In case you're not sure what the Superbowl is - it's "a football game played each year to determine the championship of the [American] National Football League." That rather dry description comes from The American Heritage Dictionary. There are more definitions/descriptions here.)

Hardly any of the bloggers whose RSS feeds I read actually talk about the game itself - everyone is talking about the advertising at the event. And there are lots of conversations.

Chris Pirillo points to a very convenient place to go to where you can view all the Superbowl ads - the iFilm 2005 Superbowl Ads Showcase with 68 commercials plus some that were banned.

And no 'wardrobe malfunctions' this year.

Oh, and if you're wondering, the winners were the New England Patriots who beat the Philadelphia Eagles 24-21. Looks like it was an exciting game. But nobody watched it, though, because they were all watching the commercials!

For really exciting football, without all the body armour and commercial breaks every five minutes, I'd recommend rugby. The Six Nations Championship is well underway with three great games this past weekend - France vs Scotland, Wales vs England and Italy vs Ireland. Great video highlights on the BBC.

Olympic blog ban

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has barred athletes, coaches and nearly everyone associated with a team from writing about their experiences for a newspaper or website - blogs included.

News report by Network World via Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion:

Network World | Olympic blog ban

So it's now official. Also see my post on 12 August re potential ban on blogging as commented on (in his Olympic blog) by US Olympic swimmer Scott Goldblatt.

It will be very interesting to see how the IOC will enforce this ban. There are now loads of Olympic blogs (just do a Google search) that have sprung up in the past week, many authored by people in the IOC's banned category. What will they do - sue everyone?

Olympic organization feats

Watching the spectacular 2004 Olympic Games opening ceremony on TV last night got me thinking about the organization behind it all. The sheer feat of putting together the 2½ hour event deserves admiration and congratulations to everyone involved for its success.

72,000 people in the new olympic stadium, representatives of the teams from 202 countries and an estimated global TV audience of 4 billion enjoyed a phenomenal event that was uplifting, emotional and testimony to the possibilities of collective human endeavour.

BBC SPORT | Olympics 2004 | Athens lights up the Games

While organizing the opening ceremony was a feat in itself - 2,500 performers with rehearsal time of 600 hours over 85 days, according to the BBC report - one of the things that's caught my attention is the technology infrastructure behind the scenes that will support the games and what you see and hear on TV and radio or read in print media and on websites.

The lead technology partner is Atos Origin, a French-based IT services and solutions company with annual revenues of more than EUR 5 billion. They lead a consortium of other technology companies supplying 10,500 PCs, PDAs and other computing devices, 1,000 servers, 23,000 phones, 2,500 intranet terminals, 13,000 mobile phones, 4,000 printers and all the timing and scoring to run the games. Atos Origin acts as global integrator, bringing hardware, software, applications and networking equipment together in a secure environment.

Atos Origin has developed a system to display results in a fraction of a second, before the broadcasters even hear the roar of the crowd. There are 1,500 terminals at 20 games venues available to the 21,500-strong press corps. A centralized database relays event data and results to the Athens 2004 website, world press agencies, Internet data feed and Olympic Games officials. Over 50 million pages of qualified results are printed and delivered to Olympic officials over this essential system.

So when you're watching an event on TV during the next two weeks, and the commentator suddenly reels off detailed facts and figures relating to what you're watching, it doesn't mean he has an amazing memory. He's just plugged into Info2004, an intranet with more than 50,000 pages of information, 11,000 biographies and historical results dating back to the first modern Olympics, held in Athens in 1896, that's available to journalists, athletes and International Olympic Committee officials.

This is some organization!

More info:

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Invisible' technology powers Olympics

Atos Origin - Athens 2004: Olympic Games

Atos Origin - Welcome to The Atrium: The Athens Experience - take an interactive tour of the main technology sites that power the 2004 Olympic Games and meet some of the technology experts who make IT work.

Athens 2004 Olympic Games official site

Ban on blogs at the 2004 Olympics?

A report on champion swimmer and US Olympic team member Scott Goldblatt's blog on 10 August makes interesting reading, discussing as it does what looks like a ban on blogging at the Athens olympics by any competing athlete. The 2004 Olympic Games start tomorrow, 13 August.

Excerpt comment:

[...] It seemed that blogging was outlawed here at the Games. After further research, I found that each federation (country) holds the right to choose what they do and do not allow. I found out that Canada, so it seems, is not able to blog according to reports (see at my website) from bloggers around the web. Seemingly this news spread awfully quick, and I had to be just as fast to respond. I talked with the media officials from USA Swimming and they assured me that I was able to go ahead with these blogs, as long as I do not move into the territory of journalism. But where does that line get drawn?

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If the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and/or participating countries' national olympic committees really are trying to apply some information control here, it wiill ultimately be doomed to failure. Instead of trying to apply information censorship, they should take a leaf out of the book of the US Democratic National Convention organizers, and actively encourage anyone - including competing athletes - and not just accredited media to blog if they want. Imagine how that would broaden the spread of information and massively encourage two-way dialogs about the games in ways that otherwse would not to happen.

There's no information re blogs mentioned in the press section of the Olympics' official website. All I could find is a PDF guidelines document for non-accredited media, available from the non-accredited press info page. The IOC website wasn't accessible when I tried today.

I guess the key word the IOC should pay attention to is 'democratic.' That organization doesn't show much of that.