The Drupal community is buzzing over the confirmation that the Obama Internet team has built the new Recovery.gov web site on the Drupal platform. This open-source CMS has built a reputation of innovation, stability and malleability that is unmatched. Drupal boasts thousands of modules for almost any type of digital presence, with a focus on personalization, community building and social tools.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this implementation by the White House is the choice to use open source code. Security wonks have long been battling over the reliability of open source software, and many have retreated to the “comfort” Microsoft products because they “aren’t free.” Now, it’s hard to argue that there aren’t any case studies for Drupal where security is a priority.

Moreover, the Drupal community is driven by collaborative gain, a mirror of the Obama social message, as developers produce ever-advancing functionality and improvements for everyone’s benefit.

Oh, and Beyonce is using Drupal, too. At last.

Photo by Chinaguccio

I’m an Olympics junkie. But, until the olympiad when I can watch the event I want, when I want, wherever I want, my craving will remain unsated.

Athens 2004 gave a glimpse at the potential of the future of Olympics coverage, and as Beijing 2008 approached, it seemed that on-demand, super-immersive web strategy and mobile tactics would be ubiquitous and all-encompassing.

As it turns out, it’s not quite there yet. NBC’s has no regrets however, as their lock down of the coverage has grabbed a 17.6 Nielsen rating and $1 Billion in advertising revenue.

Nevertheless, social media and Web 2.0 has opened new doors for the dissemination and celebration of the games to spread higher, faster and stronger.

Here are some of the strategies and memes that are defining the Olympic Games online and on your mobile device:

Video

Wired’s “How to watch the olympics online”

If you’re hunting for the ultimate on-demand and live coverage online, this is a good place to start.

• howto.wired.com/wiki/Watch_the_Olympics_Online

CCTV Olympics Flash interface

Flash designers are boasting about the scope of the content being delivered on a Flash platform implementation. It’s “pretty,” I suppose, but severely limited as far as organization of the content and usability. It’s possible this answers the question whether Flash can support large projects, but that’s secondary to delivering a good user experience… and Flash just isn’t the right fit for this type of content.

• cctvolympics.com

NBC using Silverlight

… but at least the CCTV site is Flash and not Silverlight. Users, if they’re so fortunate to own a Windows PC, are forced to download the new Microsoft Silverlight plug-in to view NBC’s online video. After that hurdle is cleared, the experience is good for some, terrible for others.

• nbcolympics.com/video

Googolympics

StartupMeme lists the many Google initiatives for the games, including Gadgets, One-box search, Maps visualizations and the (arguably) revolutionary dedicated YouTube channel.

• startupmeme.com/google-geared-up-to-fix-beijing-olympics-2008-2

And here’s Google’s mobile access to stats and updates.

• google.com/m/messageboard?mb=08bj

Widgets

All the major content providers have built desktop widgets.

• www.google.ca/search?q=olympics+widget

Lenovo’s TVTonic Super-Widget

Lenovo’s has sponsored a skinned TVTonic app that allows you to subscribe to full-length events, viewable on- and off-line.

• www.tvtonic.com/olympics/install/

Interactive Strategies

CBC’s Sport Explainer

CBC explains events with simple animations. You can learn water polo by clicking on the link at the bottom right here>

• cbc.ca/olympics/water-polo/

BBC Interactive Olympic Map

The BBC leverages Microsoft Live Search Maps to surface blog and twitter coverage via a geographical visualization.

• news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/7493757.stm

NYT’s Medal Count Map Visualization

The New York Times shows us the historical (and current) medal counts for all of the modern games.

• nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html

BBC’s Olympic Myth: “Monkey”

The Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett adapt and animate a classical Chinese novel to promote BBC coverage.

• news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/monkey/7521287.stm

Mobile

Blackberry Cool’s Olympic Roundup

Follow on your Blackberry with these apps.

• blackberrycool.com/2008/08/get-the-olympics-on-your-blackberry-round-up/

Softpedia’s Blackberry Beijing Travel App

Going to Beijing? Here’s an interesting targeted Travel App.

• handheld.softpedia.com/get/Travel/Travel-Beijing-China-2008-Summer-Olympics-BlackBerry-60532.shtml

Zumobi’s Olympic iPhone App

Zumobi has a simple app – no video, but general coverage, including photos and blogs. If you have an iPhone, let me know what you think of this…

• macworld.com/article/134963/2008/08/olympics_app.html

Social Media

Twitter Hashtags: BG08, Beijing, Olympics

The twitterati can’t make up their mind on a tag, so here’s all three as they are rolling out on Twemes.

• twemes.com/BG08,Beijing,Olympics

Flickr

Wow, Flickr had a great opportunity to capitalize on all the great photos from the event… but finding the good photos is tough. Most searches return almost an equal number of protest and political images as mediocre shots of the games.

• flickr.com/search/?q=beijing+2008+olympics&s=int

Facebook Apps

Pramati has built an interesting Guess-the-Podium app for Sun. It’s a good idea, but tough to guess many events – that is, I could have an educated guess on a World Cup or March Madness app, but I’m not sure who to pick for 60kg Men’s Freestyle Wrestling. Will it be He Qin, Yandro Quintana or Mavlet Batirov who take the gold?

• facereviews.com/2008/08/07/facebook-olympics-app-by-sun/

NBC’s and other also-ran apps are available too.

Wikipedia

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Summer_Olympics

Blogs

Bloggers Blog Olympics Blogs and Twitterers

A great list of bloggers and twitterers is collected here.

• bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=808081

Athlete Blogs

With so many to follow, I haven’t had a chance to sift through these massive lists. (If you have any highlights of great athlete bloggers or entries, let me know.)

• danwei.org/blogs/athletebloggers_at_beijing_oly.php
• hehe2.net/misc/60-beijing-olympic-athletes-blogs-opml-file-directly-to-your-reader/
• summergames.lenovo.com

Wordpress Tag: Olympics

Of course, there are lots of other bloggers talking about the olympics. Wordpress aggregates the tags from these posts.

• wordpress.com/tag/olympics/

Reuters Olympics Podcasts

• blogs.reuters.com/china/2008/08/08/olympics-podcast-day-one/

User-generated content and Memes

We can’t ignore the waves of UGC and the viral contributions of general public.

FriendFeed Spanish Faux-pas

This story exploded across the web, and gains strength still via social networks.

• friendfeed.com/search?q=spanish+team&public=1

Blue Screen of Death @ Opening Ceremonies

The meme says Windows projected its infamous artwork on during the opening ceremonies. Real or fake? Either way, geeks grabbed on to the story and added another chapter to the Windows Fail mythology.

• gizmodo.com/5035456/blue-screen-of-death-strikes-birds-nest-during-opening-ceremonies-torch-lighting

LOLBush @ Olympics

The Guardian wonders if Bush “can haz” anything else to do, besides watching Misty May dig sand.

• guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/aug/12/bushlol?picture=336501045

Sponsor Strategies

Most of the official international sponsors have weak (if any) strategies – Flash timelines and movies that unapologetically cram the brands down the users’ throats. If your computer doesn’t crash, check out Panasonic’s “World Wide Wave.” Yikes.

On the other side of things

McDonalds’ The Lost Ring Cross-channel Immersive Storyline

Wow. I stumbled on to this only recently, and it looks expansive, and impressive. It also looks like it’s nearly over. I’ll be looking deeper into this multilingual social media play.

• thelostring.com

Atos Origin’s On-site Infrastructure

Here’s an overview of Beijing 2008’s IT provider’s offerings, including the “Olympic Family Intranet”

• computing.co.uk/computing/news/2216061/beijing-olympics-primed-break-3988584

Kodak’s Blog?

Meh. Kodak’s final olympiad as an Olympic sponsor passes on a weak note online.

• 1000words.kodak.com

… one interesting post however, is the comprehensive gallery of Kodak’s Olympic Pins.

• tomhoehn.1000words.kodak.com/default.asp?item=2245002

Samsung’s Medal Mania

Medal Mania is a cross-Internet hunt for medals. The clues are kind of lame, but it’s a good attempt at engagement.

• medalmania.com

Official Web Strategy

Beijing 2008’s official site

One wonders at the missed (?) opportunities for the official sites to host and stream on-demand content. And for revenue streams? Sponsorships, subscriptions and fee-driven access. How about a deal with iTunes?

• en.beijing2008.cn

Vancouver 2010

Finally, a shameless proud plug for the home team currently building towards the next winter games. Go Canada Go! (See you there.)

• vancouver2010.com

This list is a work-in-progress. Send me your links and thoughts on the games…

Oh YEAH! The community of programmers at the recent Drupalcon in Boston was a passionate mob of some of the best minds in web creation. They’ve built a great product, and it’s about to hit the mainstream — in a torrential flood of mass adoption.

What sites should run Drupal?

Yours.

What is Drupal? A content and community management system. In a nutshell, everything your CMS does, Drupal does it better.

The key point for the hundreds of Drupal developers in Boston? From the creator of Drupal himself, Dries Buytaert, “Release the Killer App.”

Buytaert outlined a few key improvements to meet this ambitious goal that are in the works for Drupal version 7, due in a few months. Future killer app release aside, the features and benefits of Drupal are already very apparent in the latest implementations.

Drupal shops demonstrated several impressive case studies in Boston, with a wide range of product goals and technological implementations. The key point? It’s not just “Freaks and geeks” that are using Drupal for their World of Warcraft blogs.*

So what can one create with Drupal?

Drupal boasts over 3,400 “modules.” These code sets bolt on to one’s Core Drupal site in minutes — or as fast as your server can accept file transfers… With these modules, some Drupal rockstar developers and themers and some great team leaders, these are six examples of the amazing creations that are possible.

Popular Science (www.popsci.com)

“We wanted to practice what we preach.” – The PopSci Team.

Pingvision, one of the newish self-described ‘Drupal shops’ worked with the PopSci Interactive team to produce the online presence of the famous print magazine devoted to innovation. You can read the full case study here.

Pingvision developed a blog-style interface with publishing and workflow managment for the content creators. To meet some of the specifications, Pingvision’s developers created new modules, and is currently making them available for all Drupal users.

Zuda Comics (www.zudacomics.com)

“IBM endorses and implements Drupal.” — Oliver Siodmak, Associate Partner, IBM Global Business Services

Zuda is DC Comics’ foray into online community for comic readers — a market that is nowhere near the size of the 90s equivalent, but one that is even more passionate than ever. Zuda attempts to find the next Superman, 300 or 30 days of night, comic books-turned movies that have built cash-raking brands for DC.

Comic creators can submit their work to the community for rating. Popular work can earn these artists and writers huge opportunity in the form of a contract with DC.

IBM produced the site, executing a brilliant theme and interface for reading and rating comics on screen. The full case study is here.

Fast Company (www.fastcompany.com)

“We spent a lot of money on that, and now it’s yours.” — Ed Sussman, Fast Company Team Lead on sharing a customized module with the Drupal community.

At the Boston Drupalcon, the hybrid team of multiple companies presenting new Fast Company online community seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. The 120-pages of information architecture proved to be a challenge to Drupalize; the 500K strong existing community from Fast Company’s legacy site was obviously a task to integrate; and the hard launch date required to unveil at the Inc500 conference was unforgiving, but the outcome is impressive.

See the case study here.

Fast Company 2.0-ifyed it’s community with new tools, a new interface and a new spike in engagement. The team reports acceleration in traffic and time-on-site. If you join one site on this list, make it this one.

Warner Bros. Records Artists’ Communities

“The web site is the centre of the company.” — Ethan Kaplan, Warner Bros. Head of Technology

Warner Bros. has fully embraced Drupal as their solution-of-choice for all of their artists’ web sites. Fans of Britney (whoops, Britney.com’s been Drupalized, but she ain’t on Warner Bros., she’s on Sony BMG, so I dunno, let’s go with) Ashley Tisdale, Josh Groban, Avenged Sevenfold, Michael Buble and My Chemical Romance are enjoying new communities built around their respective and unique needs and wants.

The Warner Bros. web team boasted speed to market as one Drupal’s main benefits — they have launched more than 50 web communities in the past year, with unique databases, modules and themes (wild and crazy pink for Britney’s young fans; sparkling head shots and big type for Josh Groban’s more mature audience). The sites’ retention, according to the technical lead, easily quadruples when they switch from the one-way flash sites to Drupal’s user-empowering engine.

Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org)

Developer and business teams around the world worked together to produce the new Amnesty International web site. This implementation features Drupal’s highly-scalable localization (translation) module, including RTL (right-to-left for Arabic). CivicActions developed the site to add future languages with ease. Read the full case study here.

Rockband (www.rockband.com)

… And Drupal’s okay with Flash too. Check out Rockband’s appropriately loud and abrasive experience for a great example.

You can download Drupal at www.Drupal.org and start building your community.