Media Rush on Coverage of Beijing Olympics 2008

While the world's been looking forward to the Olympics, it has finally started with a fabulous opening ceremony yesterday.

I was on a flight on my way to Beijing just when the ceremony started. Somehow, the Chinese on board the aircraft on their way back home knew exactly when the ceremony was taking place and cheered among themselves. Olympic spirit was definitely in the air and it seemed everyone was singing one of the official Olympic songs, "Beijing Huan Ying Ni," which translates to, "Beijing Welcomes You." The song, made by 100 well known artists from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for the 100-day countdown for the games, is reminiscent of "We Are the World," and it's easy to find yourself singing along with the catchy chorus.

I managed to speak to a group of reporters and television crew members from Indonesia travelling to Beijing to do the coverage of the Olympics highlights. it was for a special documentary to be broadcast about Asian countries playing host to the grand Olympics event. As the world is looking closely on how the Chinese counry will be handling on such a huge event, media from all over the world sprung to cover every preparation details of the highly anticipated event.

As anticipation grew throughout the flight, there were loud applause when the aircraft finally touched down at Beijing airport. It was however sad that it was not one of Beijing's finest air quality days. It was still gloomy, air filled with smoke and pollution. This is somehow the biggest setback the Chinese authorities could have tried even harder to prevent.

As i was on a short working trip to Beijing, I felt unfortunate that I wasn't one of the lucky ones to get a ticket to the coveted event. But on second thought, watching the repeat broadcast of the opening ceremony on CCTV (China Central Television) and thereafter all the games sequences from the comfort of my air-conditioned hotel room wasn't so bad at all — as I saw spectators sweat and fan themselves throughout the broadcast. I can only imagine how hot those athletes must have been as they paraded into the stadium, particularly for the teams wearing suits. Now that the long-awaited game event has started in Beijing, there's be more exciting highlights coming ahead with media from all over the world bringing the event on live broadcast to its country.


Image Source : Clive Rose/Getty image

The Thoughts Before I Started Blogging

There are things worth saying, and there are things worth doing. Then there's also most of the internet.
There are 10's of thousands of blogs being posted all over the net, I ponder about the fact that everyone has a blog, my girlfriends are posting their new findings from new romantic dining places to the most frustrating anger venting about their work at the office and their bosses. If there's a weakness to most blogs in the immense blogosphere, I perceive it to be a disconnection from the reality of daily life. Most of the time it seems blogs are esoteric rambles that result in wasted hours making superficial connections with complete strangers all over the world. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think it's fantastic that people can span the globe with the clickety-clack of caffeine-frenzied fingers and meet intriguing people of diverse backgrounds from anywhere.

And if you believe it, that's something we can offer that the hot air coming from much of the blogsphere cannot. Any astronomer will tell you that hot air creates turbulence that disturbs your vision, but they'll also tell you that few people outside (even inside) the ivory tower are excited by charts and equations. The astronomers are under VERY few illusions about how popular academicese is.

It's all very well, then, for us to make these speeches to captive audiences who have paid thousands of dollars as the price of admission. They have to listen if they want to pass our courses, or, at least, reduce thousands of dollars worth of dissonance. But can we get people surfing for free to stop and notice, agree, and maybe change the way they think just a smidge? It'll be exciting to find out.

From a new blogger’s perspective, it surely demonstrates terrific response reaction from them, but then is the story of “is” really worth talking about? Don’t we have something else more meaningful, something more constructive to be covered? The philosophy of blogging is to gauge readers in conversations by forming communities.
In between those extremes of exploration and consternation, I found myself using this spot for sharing, pimping, contextualizing, opining, pointing and anything else under the sun I found valuable and interesting.


Image Source :Alexandr Stepanov, 123RF