PhotoDude.com

Sun. Aug 15, 2004

Olympic Blogging Comes of Age

In 1996, no one had yet contracted two perfectly good words (“web log”) into the ugliness we now call “blog.” Just the same, as the Olympics approached Atlanta, I was certain something new was going to happen on the web, and I wanted to be a part of it.

Even though the web is still in its infancy today, in the summer of ‘96, it still had its umbilical cord attached, and the fresh print of a doctor’s hand on its butt. I had finished my first cheesey cliche of a web page a few months before, and felt sufficiently prepared to take on what I was sure would be a relatively common activity; building a web page of my Olympic experiences. I figured I would be one of dozens of folks starting a new media tradition; individuals covering events (as opposed to organizations), on the nearly free printing press called the World Wide Web.

In the end, I felt a little like the guy who shows up for the announced cleanup of the neighborhood park, and finds he’s a crew of one. Where is everybody? Who’s going to cover all this stuff? During the first week of the Olympics, I searched the web high and low for sites, or links to sites about people’s experiences during the games. Not CNN.com. You know, home pages.

Nobody was home.

In 2000, Blogger was just becoming a fast rising star (never mind Movable Type, Greymatter didn’t even exist yet), and though there were more “blog-like” activities in Sydney than there were in Atlanta, it was still a sparse and selective view.

In 2004, Olympic blogging appears to have finally truly come of age. While I searched high and low in ‘96 with no success, and few minutes with Google now reveals lots of Olympic blogs, from a wide variety of people.

Swimmer Scott Goldblatt is running a blog of his Olympic experiences, and another at nj.com. BBC World producer Stuart Hughes is blogging from Athens, including audio entries and video. Hector Vergara, and Olympic referee from Winnipeg, Canada is placing his comments and stories online.

You’ll find a lot of sites like “The Diary of an Olympic Games Volunteer,” by people from all over the world. athene2004.be is the online diary of a 2004 Games volunteer from Belgium. “Kathy K” is sharing her Olympic Volunteer Adventure, as are Steve and Jo, and a group “of Australian volunteers (from Sydney 2000) who have gone over to Athens in 2004.”

18 Days in August is run by three bloggers in Athens. Roberto and Rene appear to be two gents from Holland sharing their experiences in Athens. Darren Rowse, who runs Digital Photography Blog, is also offering an Olympics blog.

Sportsblog.org seems to have a compilation blog going, as does OlymicBloggers.com, and Ken Frost has an Olympics blog, too.

And, as we all know, the media has recently discovered they can blog, too. Sort of. Sports Illustrated is trying a blog of sorts, with various SI writers posting shorter pieces. Cincinnati Enquirer reporter and columnist Paul Daugherty is sharing his Olympic observations online. The Detroit News has their reporters contributing to a blog, and the Scripps Howard News Service offers to take you “behind-the-scenes at the Athens Games” (note the basic MT setup). And even the official Athens2004 site has something called the Olympic Village Pulse.

That’s far from a comprehensive list, that’s just what I found in about an hour of searching and surfing. Though I’m generally a very modest guy, and know that not a one of the people listed above ever saw what I did in ‘96, I feel a bit grandfatherly about all these sites by individuals who just wanted to share their Olympic experiences: “Hey, look at what my grand kids are doin’!”

So go look at what individual people can do on the web. And then compare it to how the Big Boys play:

The Summer Olympics, which began Friday in Athens, is the first Olympic Games to be broadcast from a collection of websites. The BBC and other European networks are offering live, on-demand Internet video streaming of Olympic events to broadband viewers. But the BBC and fellow members of the European Broadcasting Union are required by their Olympic broadcast contracts to block U.S. Internet users and others from outside their home counties.

Despite its contractual lock on Olympic footage, NBCOlympics.com is offering only highlights of selected events after they have been broadcast on one of the network’s TV channels [...] By contrast, those online in the United Kingdom can watch live simulcast coverage from BBC TV’s five video streams.

But is it technically possible to restrict Internet broadcasts within specific geographic boundaries?

“Ultimately it will fail,” said Len Sassaman, a privacy-technology researcher. Once the American Internet viewing public realizes that U.K. Web surfers are watching better Olympic coverage than they are allowed to see after forking over their credit card, said Sassaman, they will look for better ways to access those images. “Bandwidth has gotten a lot cheaper over the years, so it is not so far-fetched to think that someone will set up proxy servers in Britain that would do this.”

Wired News: “Let the Web Games Begin”

Or maybe in 2008 (or 2012) individual people will be moblogging the Olympics from their video-camera phones. One way or another, technology will eventually overrule the will of the IOC.

Perhaps, one blog at a time.