This is the 2nd of several Vancouver 2010 Olympics photoessays created by Kris Krüg.

Vancouver is filled with energy now that 2010 Winter Olympic Games has officially started.

The last week has been filled with the excited fervor of the last month and anticipation of the upcoming weeks.

Here is a photographic look into the last week of adventure and celebrations, before the officially opening of the Games in Vancouver.

The Olympic torch was carried downhill on the Blackcomb mountain by world champion and olympiad Steve Podborski. Steve won a bronze medal in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Currently he is part of the VANOC and works within International Relations.

Premier Gordon Campbell seemingly is Canada's number one fan. Campbell has travelled around Canada for the entire length of the torch relay. Here he is handing out coveted British Columbia Olympic pins to fans at the Whistler Torch Celebration.

Vancouver is part of the Coast Salish territories and has a Four Host First Nation welcoming committee as part of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. Willie Lewis, dressed in a traditional Aborginal outfit, was part of the Whistler Torch Relay Celebration.

Static Photography had the chance to hang out in Whistler for the weekend with Chris Wheeler who had been following the torch relay through all of Canada. We had the chance to do some zip trekking with him! Our longest run was 2200 m.

The Olympic Torch had an extended route through all of Vancouver with the relay going through all of the neighborhoods in Vancouver. The Vancouver city council accompanied by Mayor Gregor Robertson welcomed the torch when it came to City Hall. 

Vancouver Olympiad Lori Fung, with her gold medal, was present when the Olympic Torch came to the Vancouver City Hall. Fung was the first gold medalist awarded in the sport of Rhythmic Gymnastics during the 1984 Summer Olympics which were held in Los Angeles, CA.

Iain Black welcomed the public to the opening of the VX Forum in Vancouver, BC. Black is Minister of Small Business, Technology and Economic Development in Canada and is pictured here with Nadia Nascimento and Dave Olson of Invoke Media which is the parent company to twitter-based application Hootsuite.

This is the first Olympic Games where people are full-on involved with technology and the internet. Many fans often have out their own cameras to capture their memories themselves. With this sort of documentation present for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, some of the best Olympic news coverage will be coming from the internet!

There are many different pavilions popping up all over Vancouver with all sorts of awesome installations and displays. This is a touch screen graffitti media installation in the DigiBC part of the BC Pavilion. Here one of the creators is having fun creating some interactive art.

Mayor Gregor Robertson has been a very busy man during the preparations for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Here he is outside of the W2 Media and Culture House in the DTES. He was the speaker at the ribbon-cutting of this independent media house which opened to the public.

The beautiful Olympic Athlete Village sits on the waters' edge of the False Creek. There was a bit of controversy when the athletes from Australia hung up their official Aussie flag, which is a copyrighted image. Despite some grievances with the IOC, Vancouver fought to keep the flag up!

Bombardier, the company who designed the Olympic Torch for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, also designed the Olympic Line, a train that runs from the Main Street Skytrain Station to Granville Island. Bombardier has given Vancouver two of their streetcars, on loan from Brussels, Belgium. The Olympic Line is a 60 day demonstration project so get a ride while you can! 

Visitors have been packing into Vancouver from all over the world for the 2010 Winter Olympics. This group of women associated with Ukrainian team were photographed on their way into the Opening Ceremony on February 12th. 

Another type of visitor that has been sighted in Vancouver is the increase in public security, with the influx of police from other provinces. These police officers are in fact from four different Canadian provinces! 

It was very exciting to watch the crowd gather for the Opening Ceremony at the German Saxony House. The place was packed with locals and visitors for the three hour televised event. Of course, everyone went nuts when the Canadian team was ushered into BC Place. 

The biggest secret of the 2010 Winter Olympics was the identity of the person who was to light the final torch in Vancouver during the official welcoming of the Games. Wayne Gretzky ended up carrying the torch from BC Place to the final outdoor giant torch at Waterfront station in a great fanfare. The night ended with a fireworks-filled sky. 

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games have only just begun. The city of Vancouver has ahead of it three weeks of events and celebrations!

This is only the beginning so make sure to check back for more photographic recaps from Static Photography! 

In case you missed it, here is our first photo essay about 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Thanks to Vancouver Access, Culture at the Olympics and the LA Times for republishing our first 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics photo essay!

Citizens On the Ground

Raincity Studios Sino-Away-Squad of Scales and KK, are on the ground in Beijing to cover and participate in the Olympic experience as citizen journalism, technology experts, social pundits and cultural ambassadors.

The Glimmer Twins’ tasks are diverse and their methods varied so here’s a preview:

• participating in the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies, in Beijing, August 5-7 with Olympic scholar Dr. Andy Miah’s
• documenting the scene for crowd-sourced new site: Now Public, Vancouver radio station: Crave 95, and BBC Interactive – among other media outlets



• shooting Creative Commons licensed photos delivered via Flickr
• extolling about the new, improved Bryght web community hosting product – available in free, cheap or fancy varieties
• meeting up with prospective clients to extol Raincity Studios’ status as an approved weblog vendor for Vancouver/Whistler 2010
• cheering for Team Canada at the Archery, Fencing, Women’s Softball, BMX and more summer games sports
• spreading international goodwill in the fun-loving/hard-working style they honed whilst at the Torino 2008 Winter Games.

Get Friendly

Follow along with their content via your RSS feeder, Facebook or whatever you prefer … or, if you are in Beijing, track Scales/Krug down for a photo walk, meetup, excursion, interview, geekout or just a tasty beverage. Leave a comment to or message via the arsenal of communication funnels at their disposal.

Scales’ coverage:

• Now Public – dispatches from Beijing
  episode 1: kk and Scales at the 2008 Beijing Olympics!
• Scales’ Beijing tag on Flickr
• Facebook videos (ask Robert to be your friend)
  
• Youtube videos
• Scales on Daily Vancouver

KK’s collections:

• Beijing 2008 photoset
• Facebook updates (ask Kris to be your friend)
  
• Youtube videos
• KK on Daily Vancouver

Chinese Theme and Version

Meanwhile, back in the tubes, … we are playing along with a Chinese
styled blog theme to celebrate the Games – birdsnest and everything.

Also worth reminding you that Raincity Studios’ site is
available in Mandarin for
Chinese readers. Even if you don’t read Chinese, you gotta say the site looks
really cool in kanji .

Also, the new improved Bryght hosting platform is available in Chinese for your international-minded web community hosting projects.

Approved Olympic Weblogs

In case you didn’t happen to know … Raincity Studios is an approved weblog vendor for Vancouver/Whistler 2010:

“Along with the good people at Raincity Studios, Bryght has been successfully passed an RFQ process to provide weblog services to the BC Olympic Games Secretariat.

We want to work with teams, countries, athletes, non-profits, and businesses who are preparing for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and want to take advantage of emerging internet technologies.

We can help you get online, start blogging, podcasting, posting video, sharing images, building a community and sharing your news and messages with a global audience hungry for information about the 2010 Games.

We’re experts in syndication, aggregation, web development, community development, search, microcontent, blogging, online publishing, Drupal, PHP, CSS, ecommerce, content management and hosting.

We have an experienced network of partner companies who have also been approved as Olympic vendors who we work with to offer comprehensive integrated marketing and communication campaigns from your browser or mobile phone at the front end to the web server at the back end as well as normal, real world marketing and communications.”

Have a Luge team needing a communication platform? Maybe a site to keep athlete’s and families in-touch? An interactive training diary for your entire team? We’d be pleased to help.

No matter your idea, Raincity Studios is ready to deliver a top-notch performance. Contact Raincity Studios to begin the conversation.

Bonus: Archive & Related

• Beijing coverage at Daily Vancouver
• Torino coverage at Daily Vancouver
• Symposium on Web 2.0 and the Future of Sport – Torino 2008
• Coffee talk with Gold Medalist Ross Rebagliati podcast from Symposium in Vancouver 2008
• Vancouver 2010 – Official site for Vancouver/Whistler – Media Centre
• Web Services for International Sporting Events – Bryght
• China Access Eases the Way – Raincity Radio – podcast with Andrew Gilkes of China Access 2008
• Olympic Outsider podcast Blog – iTunes – Feed
• Mobile Muse
• Scales’ at 2010 New Media Day

I’ve mentioned some pre-Olympic and Olympic Games related activities coming up in passing. Now, as topics are piling up and the Beijing Summer Games are nearing (complete with controversy), henceforth begins a blog mini-series called, “China, The Olympics, Social Media, Symposiums, etc.” – I think I’ll need a better name for the series though. Suggestions are welcome.

Background

As you likely know, Raincity Studios actively conducts business in China with an office in
Shanghai and the Raincity Studios site is published in English and Mandarin (French underway) and we collaborate with Chinese colleagues and some of us (not me) study Mandarin language and foodery. Just so ya know where we’re coming from.

Social Media at Olympics

As for the Olympic games, RCS crew were at Torino 2006 – documenting the Olympic events as social media journalists using the Torino Piemonte Media Center and creating heaps for grassroots coverage (see Torino Flickr pool, DailyVancouver Torino, coverage) as well as participating in BC House activities on a professional basis.

Along with Scales, BMann and KK in Turin, Roland, Will Pate and I linked up for a cross-ocean symposium “Web 2.0 and the Future of Sport” about tech and athletics featuring gold medalist Ross Rebagliati (Flickr coffeewithross).

Among other topics, we discussed the restrictions (or lack thereof) put on self-expression by athletes as well as ways the participants can use technology to better communicate with friends and family back home. Really so many athletes will never make it to TV and their families seek the micro-coverage possible only by crowd sourcing e.g. the first ever Nepali winter Olympian (SLC 2002 Olympics collection).

Olympian Politics

With the 2010 Winter Games coming to our HQ city of Vancouver, and the resultant controversies (mostly concerning tax money spent on events rather than poverty and homelessness), we, like much of the world, are watching as the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing is becoming increasingly politicized and watching the reaction of the government and the citizens of the world.

The most visible conundrum is the torch relay which was used as a rallying point for anti-China protesters and widely reported about on Now Public among other citizen journalism and mainstream media sites.

Certainly political gamesmanship is a staple in the modern Olympic games and the heavy handed security surrounding the torch parade is only the beginning of a conversation about the perceived emphasis on tight security and enforcing the stringent policies of the Chinese government rather than using this global event as a springboard to openness.

Having met several Olympic athletes who are eager to chronicle their experience freely, I am curious if athletes will be allowed and encouraged to speak openly while at the Games? (Blogging, Athletes and web sites – …). Can they report on their experiences in candid fashion? Can they explore the region and travel the country without hindrance? or will the world see just the parts of China which look good on TV?

Make Your Own Media

Beyond the political conversations, as social media content creators and advocates of journalistic access for indie producers, we are also watching carefully as the policies about social media coverage are created (by who?).

So far there are mixed signals about athletes not/allowed to blog, and how amateur created content can be used (is posting your personal Olympic photos Flickr OK?) How about creating podcast coverage of the games with reaction to in-person and/or televised coverage?

International Symposium

Well, we’re not the only ones with these questions. Olympic scholar Dr. Andy Miah is organizing a panel at the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies, in Beijing, August 5-7, 2008.

Before we get too far along, what is the ICOS?

The International Centre for Olympic Studies, established at The University of Western Ontario in 1989, was the first of its kind in the world. It remains the only such Centre in the Americas. It has as its primary mission the generation and dissemination of academic
scholarship focused specifically upon the socio-cultural study of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement.

And the event blurb:

The Symposium’s theme, “Deconstruction and Discourse: Odysseys in Olympic Socio-Cultural Matters,” focuses on research studies dealing with the history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy of the modern Olympic Movement.

Emerging Journalism Panel

Dr. Miah (who is a Reader in New Media & Bioethics, School of Media, Language & Music, University of the West of Scotland)’s topic is “Emergent Journalistic Practice at the Olympics” will feature a panel of Ana Adi, Beatriz Garcia, Raincity Studios President Kris Krug, Raincity Studios CEO Robert Scales,Garry Whannel, and Tina Zhihui.

Here’s the panel description from the abstract:

{Ed note: Paragraph breaks mine to make easier reading}

Research into the role of the media within the Olympic Movement has focused predominantly on representational questions. Far less research has investigated the journalistic culture of an Olympic Games or the Movement more generally, besides analyses of its contribution to sustaining the Olympic Movement.

Moreover, nearly no research has examined the work of those journalists who are peripheral to the organizational staging of the Games.

This category includes journalists who are associated with accredited media institutions, but whom might not have formal accreditation due to restrictions on numbers of passes. It also includes journalists who are from major media organizations, but whom have no intention of working from Olympic facilities. However, it also includes non-accredited journalists, which encompasses professional journalists from a range of organizations, along with freelance or citizen journalists, whose work is utilized by the mass media and is duplicated in independent domains.

This panel engages some of these issues in the form of a round table debate about the future of journalism at the Olympic Games. It reviews some of the implications of emerging new media platforms, arguing that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games can be characterized as the first Web 2.0 Summer Games. While some principles of Web 2.0 have been visible since the Internet’s inception, critical aspects of its current architecture began to flourish around 2005. Applications from this era, such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, more adequately enable users to report the Olympics as citizen journalists.

The implications of this within China and for the Olympics more broadly are considerable. As mass media organizations begin to strike partnerships with new media institutions – for instance, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) purchased a YouTube channel in March 2007 – questions remain over how the Olympic Movement will protect its intellectual property, as the base broadens over ownership claims and via distributed publishing syndication.

Next up, More Questions

Now that you are briefed with sufficient background, the next post will pose a variety of questions which the panel will discuss so you can share your opinions about “China, The Olympics, Social Media, Symposiums, etc.”

Robert Scales from Raincity Studios and Kris Krug from Bryght are featured in today’s Vancouver Sun article, “Canadians Trying To Land Beijing Contracts”. Vancouver Sun reporter Wency Leung came into our offices a few days ago to interview Robert and Kris and spoke with them about their upcoming trip to China, getting a scope and understanding on how Raincity and Bryght is looking to effect and learn from the tech and new media industry in Beijing, in conjunction with preparing for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Vancouver Sun Article Excerpt:

Vancouver-based new media partners Bryght and Raincity Studios, which are working with China Access 2008, also see opportunities at the Beijing Olympics for B.C.’s technology companies.
“We think there’s a huge market opportunity for us to do work with Chinese Internet service providers, and Chinese hosts and Chinese web development shops,” said Kris Krug of Bryght.
He added that a presence at the Beijing Games will also help Bryght and Raincity Studios prepare for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler.
“We have an interest in learning as much as we can [at the Beijing Games] so that we can find out what companies and teams and countries are looking to do online around the 2010 Olympics,” Krug said.

Kris and Rob head over to China on Thursday for 2 weeks, getting on the ground and exploring first-hand the opportunities that potentially lie ahead.

Tomorrow they will be attending the China Access Forum, meeting people from other local BC companies who have already successfully initiated business in China.

You can register for the event on the China Access website and mark it on your upcoming.org account as well.

Listen Live to a reading of the article.

Wency Leung will be tracking Rob and Kris in China and will be following up with their progress upon their return.

KK and Scales in Italy at the British Columbia Canada Place watching ad-hoc street hockey Canada vs Italy…