[WWW Meets The 1994 Olympics]

This report is a short summary of the project «WWW Meets The 1994 Olympics», courtesy Oslonett, Inc., Skrivervik Data A/S, Sun Microsystems and Norsk Telegrambyrå

Background

The day before the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer started, February 11, 1994, Oslonett Inc. started to prepare a WWW based service for Olympic results and information. The reason we didn't start earlier, was that we waited for a "go" from Skrivervik Data - the Norwegian Sun vendor. We had asked them to sponsor this effort by paying the Norwegian news wire NTB to let us hook into their electronic news feed subscribed to by the University of Oslo.

Skrivervik's upside of this, would be to have their company icon at the bottom of some of the pages, together with the Oslonett logo and Sun Microsystem's logo (they sponsored a SPARCstation 10 to run the server).

Implementation

After we received the "go", one of us started to design a layout for the server, while others started to program some Perl scripts to translate the wire news to HTML files according to the designers choice.

Our original plan was to get results only, not background information. In this way, it would be rather trivial to automatically translate event names, country names and a number of other commonly used terms from Norwegian to English.

However, it turned out that the wire service didn't tag their news messages properly, so other messages were often intermixed with the results. Those messages were still related to the Olympics though, but this caused a number of funny translations and HTML pages where 90% of the text was in Norwegian and the rest of it in some quasi English. We received a number of emails suggesting that we ought to attend some K-12 level English courses ...

Also, since the wire news messages were typed in by journalists and originally meant for use by newspapers and magazines only, the formatting and layout were not paid attention to at all. It was very difficult to assemble these things in the Perl scripts and do the formatting here, so it was necessary to do some post-editing manually on nearly every results page. A couple of people in Oslonett did a good job with this!

Images

After some days, we started to grab images from the Norwegian TV channel NRK. An Indy SGI workstation had a live video input source from a VCR we used as a tuner, and it was easy to do screen captures. The quality was not very impressing though. In fact, we got some times better quality captures by grabbing the frames we distributed by MBONE software to people without video input cards (due to lower frame rate).

We built up translation tables used by the Perl scripts, which were used to substitute names of athlets with HTML hyperlinks to pictures of the same athlets! After some days, we had a huge image archive (345 images now), and this became wildly popular. I received mails from girls who wanted me to capture Dan Jansen and Johan Olav Koss, from people with relatives among the athlets etc.

The responses from the Net

The service was announced in the USENET groups rec.sport.olympics and comp.infosystems.www as well as in NCSA What's New list. It was very exciting to sit by and watch an increasing number of connections coming in from all over the world.

After a day or two, it became clear that the network connection (64k) to our machine suffered from severe congestion due to our service. This was bad, since this line was shared by a number of commercial Norwegian IP customers. We got the line upgraded to 128k quickly (the clue was to mention the word "Olympics" to the Norwegian PTT), and this helped to some extent, but the load continued to build up, so we decided to set up a mirror service at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View.

Some statistics sampled at February 27 1994: 

     # CONNECTIONS to the Norwegian server                   : ~810.000
     # CONNECTIONS to the Sun server                         :  505.532

     # DIFFERENT computers connected to the Norwegian server :   17.774
     # DIFFERENT computers connected to the Sun server       :   13.355

     # top-level domains connected to the Norwegian server   :   51
     # top-level domains connected to the Sun server         :   49
At the time of these statistics, there are 64 countries with Internet connections in the world. We find 42 of them in our WWW logs. Those we *DON'T FIND*, are

EGYPT, TUNISIA, ANTARCTICA, ISRAEL, INDIA, KUWAIT, FIJI, BULGARIA, CYPRUS, LIECHTENSTEIN, UKRAINE, COSTA RICA, NICARAGUA, PUERTO RICO, ARGENTINA, CHILE, ECUADOR, PERU, VENEZUELA.

Needless to say, the service was extremely popular, and we received a number of nice emails from people all over the world. From many of them, our service became their main news service for the Olympics. At many places, the coverage by traditional media was ~nil, while at other places the coverage was poor and the signal/noise ratio extremely low due to ads and interruptions for commercials etc. Do you know that CBS is called Cannot Broadcast Sports?

IBM's threats

You probably all know that IBM was one of the main Olympic sponsors and responsible for the information systems and the results service at Lillehammer. But you probably don't know that they issued threats to stop us distribute the results to the Internet?

They didn't like that Skrivervik Data and Sun Microsystems were mentioned in the results pages, and claimed exclusive rights to distribute the results. They didn't like that IBM wasn't mentioned in the HTML files either. Ridiculous of course, because the news wire NTB had bought into the information systems initially for the purpose of distributing the information to newspapers and magazines etc. Do you see IBM's name and logo under each results table in your local newspaper? Of course not, and we think it is feasible to compare our service to that of a regular newspaper.

Anyway, IBM's attorneys fired threats to NTB, and said that NTB would be locked out from the information systems if we continued to distribute the results with a) without mentioning IBM or b) with SUN and Skrivervik still mentioned in the HTML pages. The end of it was that we had to remove all references to Skrivervik and Sun. It was apparently OK to mention Oslonett - we are not big enough to steal the glamour from IBM of course ..

A couple of days ago, there was a meeting here in Oslo arranged by DND - an organization for professional computer scientists. The title for the meeting was "Behind the scene of the Olympics" and IBM was invited to talk about their information systems. We asked DND to get a time-slot to speak about our WWW service. They agreed, but guess what - IBM refused ...

Some after-thought

We enjoyed doing this, and hope to offer similar services to the Net again. Reflecting about the whole thing, a number of interesting aspects with our service come to our minds. For one thing, this service fully demonstrates the power of the Internet, Internet based information systems and World Wide Web in special. Secondly, it becomes clear that WWW as a media is far more effective and functional than traditional media in some situations. You all know the benefits - the hypermedia concepts, the ability to manipulate the information electronically (save, browse, search, ..) and not to forget the fact that you reach ~20million people instantaneously with "free" information not distorted by whatever traditional media decide you must receive in addition to the information you want!

Hence find it as no surprise that traditional media in some sense "fear" the competition. Sadly enough, many of them seem to ignore the fact that electronic media has come here to stay, and that it is possible to combine elements of new and traditional media. Stay tuned to the Internet and the world of World Wide Web, and you are guaranteed to see examples of this in the near future.

The Olympic Team in Oslonett wish to thank you all for using our service and for all the feedback we received. 
  Steinar Kjærnsrød  Henning Maagerud     Leif Arne Neset  
  Project Leader     Screen Capturing     Post Editing
  HTML Layout



          Anders Ellefsrud           Kjell Øystein Arisland  
          PERL Programmer            Post Editing
                                     News Translator