Editor's Blog: Tech goes for Olympic gold

I'm a big fan of the Olympics. I can cheerfully fritter hours watching every bit of it, from archery to water polo and everything from synchronised trout fishing to speed knitting in between.

And to be honest I reckon silicon.com deserves a gold medal for its coverage of the Beijing Olympics so far.

See what happened when silicon.com editor Steve Ranger went to visit the Beijing Olympics venues.
From the Bird's Nest, to the Water Cube…

Admittedly, we had a head start. I was lucky enough to visit Beijing a few months back and got to see the tech taking shape - and I'd recommend you look at a photo story we published in the run-up to the games showing the tech underpinning the whole gigantic Olympic event.

On top of this, for the past few weeks Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for Olympic worldwide IT partner Atos Origin, has kindly been taking time out of the day job to write an exclusive Olympic diary for silicon.com, chronicling the hard work that has gone on, and is still going on, behind the scenes.

Thankfully so far it seems the biggest mishap to befall the gigantic project occurred in Hong Kong when one of the network cables was accidentally cut by someone mowing the grass. Let's hope all the problems the IT team face over the next few weeks are small ones like that.

There are times when the IT team should be very visible and there are times when they should be invisible.

And so now is the time that the attention should be on the athletes and not on the techies.

But afterwards let's not forget the IT team that has run a marathon to be ready in time - and will start that race all over again to be ready for London 2012 which is only 1,443 days away…

Editor's choice - three things you should check out on silicon.com this week:
It's the height of summer, there's nothing to do in the office so why not kick back and catch up on some fantastic video content we've got running on silicon.com at the moment. The latest of our CIO50 videos asks 'What keeps CIOs awake at night'.

If that isn't enough CIO for you, check out the latest 60-Second Pitch where our team of top tech chiefs grill another vendor.

And if you're heading off on holiday, check out our summer holiday gadgets photo story which is guaranteed to get you in the mood.