Beijing 2008 IT

zroiy — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:09:04 GMT

I hope the title of this post is not too much misleading, by IT I don't mean to talk about which brand of CPUs is being used to host the official games website, or which Imaging technology is being used by which vendor. By IT I mean that I need and want to see the Olympic games Information ,now show me which Technology I can use to get it .
Well there is of course the official Beijing and Olympics games sites. But since according to my world time zone a lot of the events would take place when I sleep or when I'm at work so watching it on a plain TV wouldn't always be an option. With RSS I can get interesting almost real time results streamlined into my favorite RSS reader. Now the only problem is to actually find the RSS feeds. The official Beijing web site has a 13 category RSS page which was actually a bit hard to find (there is a small RSS link at the bottom of the main page). For me the most interesting one is Sports News: News on the Games' sport events , only trouble is that it only includes a segment of the first sentence. You have to actually press the link to read the full detail.

There are also some more RSS feeds :

Eurosport's - Which currently looks a bit lame (only one post)
MSN/ Fox sports
Yahoo's

But the king of them all RSS feeds has got to be NBC's

It's the king because it lets you customize your RSS feeds according to nation or sport events or other relevant criteria. Here is for example the rss feed for just the Sailing events or Judo events

NBC also offers a set of gadgets that can be embedded in your favorite Web 2.0 social network ,or on your desk as a vista widget or in your blog (if your reading this from the actual web site , check out the results and schedules widget on the right pane)
I highly recommend checking it out. more info here

So what can I also get on other media fronts ? you would expect that IPTV would be huge by now , getting a boost by this global event. Well , the situation here is not that great.
Here are some IPTV options:

Youtube's dedicated channel is a bit ironic , it only serves countries where the IOC failed to sell exclusive rights which means , in my guess , that these are countries that the economic situation is not that good , which also means that a broadband connection needed to watch YouTube's streams is not that common ;-(

There are also some podcasts and videocasts
http://www.olympic.org/uk/news/podcast/podcast_vodcast_help_uk.asp

And your occasional on location video blogs

And there are also some Media you should probably avoid. here is a toolbar designed for the Olympics [ttp://2008summergames.ourtoolbar.com] (add a prefix h to this url) http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url say they are a shareware legit site, yet I would double check the end user and setup to understand what's really in there that they are installing.

I just wish that there was a cool results screen saver.

Good luck to all of the athletes!!

Making your site more RSS browsers friendly

zroiy — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:14:22 GMT

Both IE7 and Firefox 3 are embedded RSS on page aware, meaning that in order to improve user usability they provide a one click RSS subscribe button.
Here is how it looks like :

IE7 when enabled (from cnn.com)
Firfox enabled
IE7 not enabled (from bbc.com)
Firefox not enabled

Now you ask , what makes these nice buttons to be enabled or disabled. It's pretty simple, it is basically just a <link> directive placed within the <head><head/> section of the page.

here is a simple example

MacWorld 2008 downloadable videocasts

zroiy — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:42:00 GMT

All videos grouped here in this nice RSS

(Just throw it into your itunes or any other favorite RSS reader..)

It is also available in this MacWorld Videocasts listing in a much more Non RSS readers format.

Roiy Zysman : RSS

Beijing 2008 IT

Making your site more RSS browsers friendly

MacWorld 2008 downloadable videocasts