Interestingly enough, the coverage of any election still has an old school feel. A lot of people turn to TV for their marathon Election Day live prognostications and exit polls and projections. Much like the phenomenon of traditional Black Friday shopping the day after Thanksgiving and the following online “Black Monday” the real traffic for news sites occurs the day after the event as people try to make sense of what just happened. To me, it’s a little like watching a really bad football game. You watch it because your team is in it but you know you really should be doing something constructive with your time.

Yahoo is really more of an aggregator of news and their partnership with ABCNews makes them just a shill for that network and its coverage. They write some content but they draw most other content from the AP and a few other sources like Politico.com. What Yahoo brings to the table is interactive maps with projections (based on AP information of course) and other bells and whistles. The idea here is that people will be tracking the election outcome like a fantasy football team. I suppose even I will follow this thing but with a different eye than most. So you all know where I stand, I believe a politician is a politician is a politician regardless which side of the two party system you sit on. I think it will be most interesting to watch how different outlets try to spin things to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd. The most likely victim in this whole thing will be the truth but, hey, who’s counting?

For Yahoo there is a lot at stake. Since it ranks among the top news sites on the net there are huge advertising dollars to rake in. Yahoo actually outperformed the MSNBC network of sites during the Olympics (which NBC televised so that shows how much people like the traditional networks). If Yahoo can set itself apart during this coverage it stands to help itself during a time when the news on Yahoo itself is not so good.

Here’s my question. Based on the banner year of ‘one time’ events like the Olympics and this campaign of Olympic marathon proportions what will Yahoo think it can get for advertising in the future? Will the numbers that this has generated (some projections place it at 3 times the volume following the last presidential election) translate into higher ad costs for advertisers or will the advertisers fight back with the argument that the numbers for 2008 are inflated? If I was an advertiser I would be fighting already. You know that Yahoo will make serious claims about its traffic etc but any thinking advertiser will ask them to get to the real numbers. Otherwise, they will be paying for phantom traffic based on a huge bubble created by this ‘event’. Should be interesting.

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During the next two weeks, you’ll be hard pressed to avoid seeing and hearing about the Olympic Games whenever you turn on the TV or radio or pick up a newspaper at the newsstand.

For sports fans (and anyone else like me who simply enjoys watching a series of such spectacular events that celebrate what people can achieve), this will be an amazing two weeks.

So the mainstream media – and especially television – is the place to go, so to speak, to catch the full audio-visual majesty of these games.

I can see my PVR working overtime during these Olympics.

I’m also interested in the niche views – what individuals are experiencing that won’t make the mainstream coverage; what those individuals think about what they’re experiencing and how they interpret events.

Social media is the perfect means to do that. I have my RSS alert for blogs set up plus some specific keyword watches in FeedDemon. I’ve also subscribed to the special Olympics coverage at Global Voices which I’m sure will have some really interesting content.

I’ve done little more than that at the moment as the sheer volume of content out there is already almost overwhelming.

ReadWriteWeb has a couple of good posts about social media and the Olympics, about video and mobile. All a bit too US centric for me but useful nevertheless.

For my video consumption, I’ll be paying most attention to three resources:

1. The BBC’s Olympics coverage on TV as well as online (the reporters’ Olympics blog in particular) to get the mainstream media perspective.
2. To complement that, I’ll be checking in to the Qik 2008 Olympics event page which will aggregate live video from qikkers in Beijing broadcasting from their mobile phones. Unfiltered views, should be interesting.
3. I’ll also be checking the official Beijing Olympics 2008 YouTube Channel to see what filtered video content looks like.

And of course, there’s Twitter.

So many individual people will be tweeting and there’ll be no shortage of instant commentary and opinion.

One neat idea focused on today is #080808, an initiative from a group of Chinese bloggers:

8 is a lucky number for the Chinese, and 08/08/08 is definitely a very special day. Twitter users can add the hashtag #080808 to all your tweets about Beijing Olympics on the 08/08/08. Currently if you search for #080808, you can see a new #080808 tweet coming up every 0.5 seconds!

Plenty to get stuck into.

What resources are you using to keep with with the 2008 Olympics?

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