Keeping A Finger On The Pulse Of The Olympics, One Tweet At A Time

NBC Sports together with Stamen Design have created a real-time visualization of the Olympic discussion on Twitter, similar to a feature I've viewed before on CNet news, I believe. The tool tracks the chatter and by monitoring keywords popping up on the social networking service. The more discussion on a particular topic, the larger the image displayed in the tool. Twitter Tracker continually scans and updates, clicking on an image will drill down on the topic and display the most recent tweets. I imagine there may be a lot of minimized browser windows pointed at Twitter Tracker... and much to my surprise and delight the dominant topic this morning as I write this is Curling! Either there are a lot of us curlers on Twitter or this Olympics is doing a lot for the profile of the sport.

EH, OH, Canada Go!

Source: NY Times Bits Blog

NBC - Yahoo Big Olympic Traffic

According to the NYTimes.com, "NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006 Games in Turin." Perhaps it was the huge time difference or the proliferation of broadband access to the home, but this year more people flocked to their computers to keep up with their favorite events / athletes. “The demand that we’re seeing has far exceeded even our wildest expectations,” said Jimmy Pitaro, the head of sports and entertainment for Yahoo. Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC, concluded that many NBCOlympics.com visitors used the Web site as a video playback device. “People want to catch up on events that they miss,” he told reporters during a conference call on Aug. 13. “About half say that’s the main reason”

NBC to offer shows for free download... with ads

After having removed it's content from Apple's iTunes store over a difference in opinion regarding the rates they should be receiving for their downloads, NBC has announced that it will be making it's content available for free, sort of.

A new service, called NBC Direct, will begin in October that will allow users to download shows to be watched for up to a week after they air on the network. Their is a proprietary viewer that must be downloaded and installed, which currently only works on Windows PCs. The catch is the content will contain advertisements as opposed to the ad free download and pay model used in iTunes. Interestingly the service is only available to PC users at the moment, coincidence?

It's unclear whether or not the service will be available outside of the U.S.

The New York Times, Bits column has the details.