With Beijing 2008 now a distant memory, the Australian Institute of Sport is already trying to track down any potential medal winners for London in 2012 — and now it’s added a web twist to the process. Its eTID (Electronic Talent Identification And Development) site lets budding young athletes submit their results in a series of general and sports-specific tests, and invites youngsters with above-average results to visit the AIS for more testing and possible placement in a scholarship program If your offspring (or cousins) are showing potential in school sports, this is a relatively pain-free way of finding out if they can go further. eTID [via The Australian]
Tech blogger Andy Baio reports that plenty of high-quality Olympic footage is (illegitimately) available for download via BitTorrent and Usenet. Baio compares sample footage from the 2004 Olympics he found on Usenet to a clip from this year’s NBCOlympics.com stream, to a high-quality HDTV rip he found on Usenet this year. Unsurprisingly, the pirated download is much higher quality than the stream. Are you streaming, pirating, or just DVR’ing your Olympics fix this year? Let us know in the comments. Pirating the Olympics, Then and Now [Waxy.org]
Want to know whenever Australia’s won a medal at the Beijing Olympics, but don’t have access to a TV — or know that it’ll mean 50 minutes of viewing for every 10 minutes of productivity? Follow user @AussieOlympics for brief updates whenever something notable happens at the Games.
Google unveils a 2008 Summer Olympics landing page, a clearinghouse for various GOOG tools that are tracking the events in Bejing. See a Google Map of medals, YouTube video highlights, Google News headlines, a 3D video tour plus Sketchup models of the venues, and add an iGoogle gadget that tracks medal counts to your Google homepage. How are you following the Olympics this year (or are you avoiding them altogether)? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Google 2008 Summer Games [via The Official Google Blog]Here’s some news you’re unlikely to have missed: the 2008 Beijing Olympics are about to start. If you’re an Olympics tragic or an uber-patriotic type, then your big challenge for the next fortnight is working out how many late-night broadcasts you can watch without destroying your career, using Google to locate your favourite obscure event, and adding a few #080808 tags to your Twitter feed. But if (like me) major sporting events just aren’t that interesting (or your concerns about China’s human rights record are rising to the fore), here’s 10 cool and useful things to do with your PC while everyone else is obsessing over the medal count.(Photo by Nagyman.)
Find out when events in your favourite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and “Olympics” into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.
Google’s Olympics Onebox [Google Blogoscoped via Garett Rogers]
