It’s taken seven years of planning, six years of whinging and a solid 12 months of being baffled by the restrictions LOCOG have placed on British businesses. But the 30th modern Olympic Games will finally be formally opened tonight in London.
And, understandably, the internet is beginning to get a little bit excited, as demonstrated by Google’s latest doodle (pictured).
But if you missed out on tickets and time off over the coming weeks, you might be wondering how best to keep up with events on the track, in the pool and wherever it is that the women’s trampoline gymnastics takes place.
Fortunately for the office-bound masses, there are plenty of places to keep up with the events online – although we have to say that watching the men’s single sculls when you should be working might not be a great career move.
Watching
The best place to watch the Olympics online is via the official UK broadcaster – the BBC.
BBC iPlayer Live will be showing the vast majority of events, including some that won’t command lots of TV screen time. So if you prefer the fencing to the freestyle swimming or the judo to the long jump, the Beeb’s your best bet.
If you can’t get iPlayer, it’s a safe bet that videos will end up on YouTube very soon after various events finish, so it might be worth updating your subscriptions now.
Analysis
If you want an explanation of what you’ve just watched, or what you’re currently watching, all of the usual suspects will be running live blogs of the major events.
A quick trawl through Google News will show you who’s covering what, but given that The Guardian and The Telegraph would live blog the opening of an envelope, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be covering most events.
Discussing
Finally, we come to the whole point of huge events like this. Discussing it with your friends. Unlike the 29 previous events, this Olympics should prove to be the social media games.
Which means that things like #Olympics #TeamGB and #UsainBolt will all be trending on the social networks for the duration, so you’ll want to fire up your Twitter client and open up your phone’s Facebook App.
But don’t be surprised if there are outages. Twitter crashed yesterday after two data centres failed to keep up with the buzz prior to the men’s football matches including Great Britain vs Senegal.
During Euro 2012, the service was having to process 15,000 tweets per second (mostly asking why Wayne Rooney had disappeared) – and with over 2,000 verified Olympians using the service, it won’t be surprising if the service takes another battering.
However you keep up with the Olympics, make sure you enjoy it!
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BREAKING: Not Olympics-related, but something we’ve covered before. #TwitterJokeTrial protagonist Paul Chambers has had his conviction quashed by the High Court. FirstFound applauds this return to common sense.
