Well, we are officially under way after the opening ceremony in Beijing – which I have to admit started to get boring after a while. The Olympics was expected to be the event that finally opened China up to the rest of the world but is this really going to happen?
An interesting article in The Guardian suggests not. According to the the Guardian Lenovo (the Chinese computer company and sponsor of the Beijing Olympics) has reserved the right to only choose blog postings it likes to directly link to and quote from on its website by monitoring – and definitely not censoring - the comments of the eight British Olympic athletes who will provide blogs to be hosted on its website.
Dan Grabham at Tech Radar has looked into this further and found that Lenovo has said that competitors were only allowed to write blogs until the opening day of the Olympic Games, and could then resume their blogs after the conclusion of the Games. It’s only as a result of new regulations from the International Olympic Committee that mean athletes can blog off the field of play during the 17 days of competition.
This is backed up further by Berkeley PR’s local paper The Reading Chronicle which led with a story on the front page about its columnist (Reading reserve goalkeeper who is at the games with Australia) has been instructed not to comment on what the Olympic venue looks like, don’t post pictures on Facebook or other websites and best of all – don’t speak of your experiences in Beijing.
The Chinese are quite obviously keeping a tight security around all things surrounding the Olympics. This was demonstrated by a piece on the New Scientist this week which explained that a cheap electronic replica of the Olympic torch which was to be sold at all venues has been pulled. Apparently when the torches are waved, movement sensors coordinate flashing LEDs to spell out “Hello” in English or “China” in Chinese. All well and good, but the Chinese fear that the devises could be hacked into and instead a whole stadium will be waving “Free Tibet” messages.
Something tells me it will all be slightly different in four years time.
