Day: August 11, 2008

Anyone know where Brooks Brothers is in Beijing?

… because I just ruined a nice set of blue Brooks Brothers boxer shorts when our Olympic blogging site went dark for 30 minutes. Story of my life — when the website absolutely positively cannot go down — it will go down. Without fail. Forbes.com alumni will recall the September 1999 disaster when we lost the site for three days during the publication of the annual list of the 400 richest Americans. That was 72 hours of badness.

This one was particularly hairy because the site is our default in our iLounges — internet cafes for athletes and their guests in the Olympic Village. Press is all over it. This site CANNOT fail.

My man Esteban Panzeri was able to get it fixed, but I still need a new pair of these:

Back now, all is well. But now I have the paranoia.

The Media Equation – All of Us, the Arbiters of News – NYTimes.com

This is a very important column by David Carr on the effects the Web 2.0 Games are having on the containment of content by the mainstream media. Very important. This is it ladies and gentlemen. Image of little boys with their fingers in leaking dikes comes to mind. Take 10,500 athletes, give them video cameras, cell phones, whatever, and watch them share what they see with the world.

“On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.

Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC’s game of “whack-a-mole” as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free, its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived.

The Media Equation – All of Us, the Arbiters of News – NYTimes.com.

Beijing Day 2

Very little time to blog, but …

Went to the USA House yesterday — the hospitality center in Chaoyang at the Worker’s Stadium (didn’t see many workers) sponsored by the USOC and the US Olympic sponsors — to find the Randt brothers (Clark and Paull) as Paull is blogging for Yale and we hung out at the Wall on Saturday night. He was nowhere to be found, but Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy scored me an invite to the premier of a documentary sponsored by Kleenex about emotional Olympic moments called “Let It Out.”

The concept was brilliant. Sponsor a film about the more emotional moments in Olympic history to make people cry and use more Kleenex. I’m a weepy guy, I admit. I am in touch with my inner boo-hoo, but the audio wasn’t awesome enough to hear everything but …

I still get all tingly over the 1980 Miracle on Ice. I watched that go down at college, and remember as the US won, and goalie Jim Craig is searching for his recently widowed Dad in the stands with a USA flag on his shoulders 100 drunk and crazy college students singing “God Bless America” because none of them knew the words to the Star Spangled Banner. I cried then.

The documentary was very very good and when it gets on line at letitout.com you should watch it. The trailer is up there now.

The last time I cried was June when I flew back from Tokyo and watched this other documentary , Young At Heart, about a senior citizen’s chorus in Northhampton, Mass.. The scene where the show goes on at a Massachusetts prison after they learn one of their fellow members has passed away, and they sing Dylan’s “Forever Young” to a crowd of tattooed hard-time inmates … and make them cry. Well, I challenge anybody to watch that film and not start leaking.

Anyway, blog site just crashed (Thanks MidPhase!) and I have fires to extinguish!

Blogger: Abhinav Bindra’s Road to Beijing – Post a Comment

Blogger: Abhinav Bindra’s Road to Beijing – Post a Comment.

Over 1100 comments on Abhinav’s blog this morning. Wow. The man is a rockstar in India this morning. So cool he’s got a place for people to reach out and digitally slap him on the back.

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