Sunday, August 24, 2008

The Beijing Olympics website kind of SUCKS too

Yep, I'm getting mighty fed up of the Beijing Olympics website.

I was hoping to go and see some of the Men's Marathon live this morning, but do you suppose there are any details of the course on the site? Not that I could find! (In fact, I couldn't find much information about the route anywhere on the Internet. There were a few blogs by Beijing-based runners who claimed to have found details of the route, but they weren't very detailed in their descriptions, and tended to concentrate on just a few sections of it, or the major landmarks passed. NO-ONE seemed to have a map. Perhaps it was supposed to be A SECRET - yet another cunning element of the mightily impressive [not] Olympic security regime.)

It does work, just about. But they are slow to update it. It's very barebones in appearance, and not especially user-friendly: the display of results certainly isn't easy to read, and there doesn't seem to be any single-page display of the results for all rounds of a competition, or any straightforward single-page timetable. There are some odd glitches from time to time, too (the medal totals in the gold, silver, and bronze categories not always tallying with the overall totals given for each country - well, you know, who cares about anyone else's medal total so long as China's way out in the lead?). Some sports - such as the astonishingly popular beach volleyball - appeared to be mysteriously missing from the dropdown menu listing events by discipline. And there is no search function on the site.

All in all, pretty sucky. I hope London can do better. Well, it can scarcely do worse.

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