Are You Following The Olympics?

Thursday, 18 February 2010

We experience events like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the State of the Union address together by watching them on television—it’s the next best thing to being there for most of us. I (@ChloeS) collaborate with our media partners, and have enjoyed watching them weave together new ways of experiencing these events that are even more engaging and interactive.

CNN’s recent State of the Union experiment and MTV’s Video Music Awards effort are recent examples. For the Olympics, NBC worked with Stamen Design to produce a Twitter Tracker capturing Olympic highs and lows—the joy, the disappointment, and the humor. Check out the shift in attention on Wednesday night from Shani Davis’ speed skating gold run to the halfpipe antics of Shaun White (during his “Double McTwist 1260,” Stamen tracked over 1,000 tweets per minute about Shaun):

The NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker showcases reactions with an authenticity and passion that can only come straight from the fans and athletes.

So many of us want to experience the full richness of an event, television show, or news story. Increasingly, this means participating in it, and then seeing that very participation reflected in the event itself. We’re only just scratching the surface of this opportunity but we’re pretty excited about more experiments like this in 2010.