a summer of research

This summer was full. I was the lucky UK representative at the International Olympic Academy, a one month seminar held in Olympia, Greece on Olympic topics ranging from the Ancient Olympics, to ethics, human rights and marketing. I have particularly enjoyed the marketing and ethics presentations given by Dr Benoit Seguin and Dr Andy Miah (my supervisor) but I found the exploration of the Olympic’s Ancient past as presented by Dr Albanidis as being extremely informative and interesting. 

I also delivered a paper there called “(New!) Media and the Olympic Movement” on the Olympic Movement’s relationship with traditional and emerging media since the revival of the Olympic Games. As far as I know, the paper will be published in the IOA proceedings next year. Taking into account that I presented the paper to a non-media specialized audience, I believe the presentation went quite well. Here’s a photo:

during my presentation @ the IOA

ICOS presentation, (c) Kris Krug

Also this summer, I have been part of a panel debate on the expectations and influence of new media at the Beijing Olympic Games. The debate was held during the 9th International Olympic Studies Symposium, in Beijing, just a couple of days before the Games started. The trip wouldn’t have been successful nor would my data gathering possible hadn’t I been the happy and lucky winner of a Universities China Committee in London grant. Thank you UCCL!

National Olympic Academy, London, 2008

This weekend I am going to attend the National Olympic Academy down in London, an event organized every year by the British Olympic Foundation. It is a great opportunity to meat people that research the Olympics or are involved in one way or another with the Games. It is even a greater opportunity since I will be presenting the general framework of my research and some preliminary results. Needless to say I am excited and really looking forward to this. 

Picidae – Journey to the end of the Internet

A friend of mine sent me today this link. It is a project developed by two Berliners aimed to help people accessing the Internet from highly monitored/firewalled/secured locations visualize websites that are normally forbidden. Their project and the way they present it is highly humanitarian and works for giving Internet users access to a non-censored Internet by tricking the firewall system by allowing the user to connect to an outside proxy or server. They say that tested their idea in the heart of Beijing accessing “forbidden” websites in plain daylight and from public Internet Cafes.

According to the authors, when accessing an unauthorized website in countries with high Internet censorship a message signaling a network problem will be shown. What the user has to do then is to invoke the pici-server and fill in the same web address that was reported as unreachable. “The pici-server then creates an image of that website and sends this back. To make surfing on that image possible, pici-server analyses the web site and puts links via image maps onto the image where they can be seen on the web site. So one can click in the web browser with the mouse onto the links like on the “true” web page.”

I wonder what the Chinese Virtual Policeforce (see some posts ago) said to this?

For more info check: http://www.picidae.net/. 

story

Every emblem of the Olympics tells a story. For example, the one of the Beijing Olympics represents Beijing’s hospitality and hopes. It is also said that in its dancing (for the emblem is called “Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing) carries the city’s commitment to the world.

Creating an emblem that should satisfy all, and if not the greater majority, is a hard task… because there are, in effect, more majorities to please: the people of the host country, the IOC, the politicians, the cultural representatives, the opinion leaders, pundits, corporate sponsors, media, academia and so on. More than that, the emblem needs to be a concentrated symbol of a nation, of a region and also of a concept for equality, peace and performance. Therefore, to tell such a story and concentrate in a few images and even less words is, as I said, a hard task. Yet, as hard as it seems as the cities that hosted the Olympics managed to come up with an emblem that not only told their story but also the one of the Olympic ideals, goals and hopes.

Every emblem tells a story but nobody yet, not as far as I know, told the story of all the emblems, of how they were created, what they represent, how and why they were chosen. I wonder where the other sketches, the non-winning ones are so that I could tell the story of all the Olympic emblems.