Sunday, August 17, 2008

Get Olympics Update from the Ground

We’re in the middle of the Olympics. Coverage on TV and the “official” Internet sites are heavily structured to either make it easy for you to see what’s interesting to you or to limit your viewing to highly-filtered, corporate-money-making controlled content – depending on your point of view. (The official site is at http://en.beijing2008.cn/.)

But thanks to social media, you can find out what’s happening in real time from people who are there as spectators. Here are just two easy ways.

1. Tweetscan.com lists all the Twitter posts (most recent first).

Go to http://www.tweetscan.com/ and type 080808 into the search field. (080808 is the tag or “keyword” that Twitter users are using to indicate their post is about the Olympics.) You’ll see current posts (called “tweets”). The ones with the boxes were created in other languages. You do not have to be a Twitter user to use Tweetscan.

2. Qik is a free online service that lets people stream video that they are shooting from their cell phones or video cameras in real time.


3. Youtube has set up a page dedicated to videos about the Olympics.

1 comment:

Fran Stephenson said...

This is an interesting way to take your technology with you, but based on how many hours I have spent in front of the television, watching "traditional" media coverage, I am burned out on Olympics. Marking my calendar for Clsoing ceremony on August 24!