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I’ve been reading on an Amazon Kindle the past four days and am growing fonder of the device with every passing day. (It’s a $350 “electronic book” with WIFI for wireless downloading of books, magazines, newspapers). Somehow one got ordered and charged to my account (I suspect some idiot in the house logged in and stuck it in my cart. But I am so enamored I think I will keep it.

Ergonomically it’s a bit of a mess — I’m sure everyone who has used one has bitched about the previous and next buttons and the lack of a great gripping experience — the leather cover barely hangs on, but the text is very crisp and the lighting is essentially nonexistent — meaning you need to seek an external light source just as you would with a book.

Battery life is long. Images are okay (grey-scale). So far I have subscribed to Forbes (no images or ads), one day of the New York Times (no images or ads), ordered the Ken Follett sequel to Pillars of the Earth and am nearly halfway through Dave Egger’s What is the What about the Lost Boys of the Sudan.

I can see the Kindle earning a place in my knapsack for travel and sparing me the usual three-title mess I usually jam in there. Only problem is lack of titles, not everything is in Kindle format and the books I want aren’t necessarily there. I will probably shove an SD card in for more memory space and have yet to connect it to my PC via USB to back stuff down. The browser is decent, the keyboard … at least it is QWERTY. All in all I like it on some levels, hate it on others (can’t loan a book to a buddy, can’t stick a book on a shelf, can’t have an author sign the flyleaf).

Verdict: for serious travelling readers, a good idea.

This week: Cotuit, still decompressing, lots of post-Beijing stuff to get out of the way

Sept 8-12: Bangalore, global interactive workshop

Sept 16-19: Raleigh, CEO review, CMO workshop

Sept 22-23: Folio Show, Chicago, I speak

Sept. 24-25: NYC, AdWeek panel

Last week of month — some vacation. Thinking about camping at Truro for stripers

I am inordinately proud of my rowing calluses but lost them in Beijing due to three weeks without an oar or an ergometer to keep them healthy and tough. Three consecutive days of sculling this week, some vigorous pull-ups on the chin-up bar, some hang-power cleans with the Olympic bar, and my hands have turned into hamburger. Nothing to be done but suck it up and keep abusing them until they scab up and go hardcore again. Some Rhode Island Soapworks gardener’s healing hand salve is next (I cannot abide Bag Balm) but will turn my keyboard into a slippery mess.

It is time to get serious about the fall rowing season and mail off some regatta entries today.

Fall races I should enter

• Megunticook Mini-Marathon: Camden, Maine. Ten miles. Supposed to be beautiful course. Got to make my mind up now, the race is next weekend, the 6^th and Maine is a long drive from the Cape. http://www.echorowing.com/Megunticock_Mini-Marathon.pdf
• Coastweeks, Mystic, Connecticut. Awesome course, head-style (running start, race the clock) best maritime museum in the world. Two hour drive. Happens just after I return from Bangalore and before a week in Raleigh. I dunno. Excuses, excuses.
• Green Mountain Head, Putney, Vt, Sept. 28. My favorite. Just gorgeous scenery. World class rowers. Prizes are bag of apples, block of Vermont cheddar, bottle of maple syrup. Also it’s a stake race, so there’s the fun of trying to turn a boat around a buoy which is like making a cow dance.
• Textile River Regatta, October 5. Lowell. Merrimack River. Never done it. Might be tempted. http://www.textileriverregatta.org
• Head of the Connecticut: Connecticut River, Middletown, CT – home of Wesleyan. Heard it is a good race. Dunno. This is turning out to be too long a list I think. Wife is not going to be into watching middle-age crisis man slog down autumn rivers of New England.

Hit the rack at 9 last night, too delirious to hold my eyes open, but drugged myself with a Restoril for extra insurance. Then Junior burst in with news of an unwanted phone call: “Loser!” he said. “It’s not even 9 and you’re in bed!” I pleaded that my circadian rhythms, whatever they are, were confused, and fell back into an uneasy slumber, the dog using my face as its pillow. At 4 a.m. I was back awake, this time with the usual terror dreams of naked public speaking, elevator plunges (naked elevator plunges) and missed appointments. “A fine day to slay the dragon!” I exhorted myself and my irritable bladder. “Up and at ‘em!”

So now it’s five a.m.. I have eaten my daily bowl of oatmeal, am on cup number two of double-strength Peet’s French Roast (espresso ground for that full amphetamine experience), and now have the entire day ahead of me. I need to edit some college essays for a friend’s daughter – and I need to sort out travel for the next month – Bangalore, RTP, Chicago, NYC – I need to pay bills, deal with this quarter’s taxes, sort through my Olympic souvenirs, dig though 4000+ photographs from Beijing, write thank-you notes, file collected business cards, answer moldering emails, set up conference calls, ward off the bureaucrats, and fit in my daily Crossfit torture. From hanging around gold medalists to paying the garbage man …. I feel mentally whip-sawn between the alien exoticism of Beijing and the early fall despondency of a Cape Cod summer town gone quiet and to seed now that the tourists and renters are back in Bronxville and Westchester getting ready for the start of school.

The harbor is vacant. Yesterday I launched my shell at 9 and set off into a stiff northeasterly breeze, the first pure air I’ve had in a month, pumped right down across the Gulf of Maine from Greenland. It was a good row, nearly a fantastic one, with a strong pace that nearly convinced me to start filing more Fall Head regatta applications before it is too late. I lost weight in China and worked out every day using the Crossfit regime, so now is the time to really start focusing on that late February weekend when I intend to do some damage at the World Indoor Rowing Championships. I did make a request to be let onto the rowing course at Shunyi near the Beijing Airport for a personal victory lap. The CMO of one of Lenovo’s key suppliers got on the course a week before the Games and I wanted to do the same, but no, the course was locked down for the Paralympics which starts this week on the tail of the Olympics. Some other time perhaps.

I have a few posts to get out the door. They are:

1. A recap of the Voice of the Summer Olympics program. The metrics indicate the program in terms of traffic, blew away the targets set late in the spring. The media campaigns that surrounded it were also strong and over delivered their targets. In terms of press and reputation, I think the program went beyond what I expected. So, victory will be declared, I need to lock down the final report on the interactive component of Olympic sponsorship today for a review with the CEO next Tuesday.
2. A theoretical post on the future of athletic blogging and its place in the long tail. I sense that PC and consumer electronics marketing is going from what we call “spec pods” (speeds, capacities, dimensions) to a more task/application model. In the mid-80s, customers of the first PCs didn’t ask for an “8088 with 256K RAM” – they wanted a “Lotus 1-2-3 machine” for financial modeling. Today, Best Buy and other retails are starting to show more products marketed with an end-state, or goal in mind. “Get your video on YouTube.” I think the same is coming to consumer PC marketing as the so-called Web 2.0/Social Media revolution climbs down from the mountain of hype and into a sustainable state where everybody from chatty teens to Michael Phelps to your mom begins to seek hardware and software on the basis of how it activates the new consumer of model of “click, consume, contribute” rather than the old one of “configure and confusion.”
3. Search as the proxy for brand awareness and media impact on brands. Avinash Kaushik, guru of web metrics gurus at Google throws the question at my feet about why Google Analytics is showing a decline in ThinkPad searches and an increase in Lenovo searches. As we ran a butt-load of television through NBC during the Games, TV that was designed to build awareness of the word “Lenovo” in the minds of the American public, we saw some interesting side effects, not direct effects that one would expect. So …. Share of voice. Pre- and Post-awareness. Readers of this blog know I detest the notion that one can build a brand online through mindless repetition and pure SOV – that I believe brand is earned through a reputation for customer service and word of mouth about one’s excellence. All well and good. But when the brand actually spends three weeks advertising like its top competition does all of the time what is the net effect and what can be learned the morning after?
4. Digital rights vs. broadcast rights: I believe we’ll see some interesting divisions in the old broadcast model of large events, with Fox, NBC, Eurosport spending a lot of money for exclusive broadcast rights. I bet that the IOC and NFL and others are going to get wise and sell off the digital rights in a separate stream very soon. When that happens, whoo-ee, if Beijing wasn’t a web experience, just wait a few years. It’s a coming.
5. China SMM: lots of smart thoughts and insights shared at a final lunch with Will Moss, Sam Flemming and Kaiser Kuo. I need to digest, but let’s say the forthcoming US blogger tour of China is going to open some eyes in a big way – not necessarily positive. First off – China is not a blogger’s paradise. As Sam F. has pointed out – the world is built on forums over there. As Kaiser puts it, blogs are what he calls “Sick Kitty Blogs” (This is my kitty. My kitty is sick. Please send me money so I can take my kitty to the doctor.)

So, lots on my mind, lots to do, a desk to clean off, mementos to catalogue and now a holiday weekend on my doorstep. The crickets are frantic in the darkness, the paperboy just tossed the Times onto the end of the clamshell driveway, in two hours the bonito should be crashing out in the Sound, and I’ve got a lot to answer for.

Right now I am in the Dulles Hilton, victim of a missed connection last night that would have had me home by now. I am zen, took the voucher, ate a cheeseburger at the bar, saw the Sox spanked the Yanks, drank two Sierra Nevada’s went to bed and dreamt of missed plane connections .;… the kind where the concourse gets longer as I run down it weighed down by bags of dirty laundry, phone chargers, cameras, laptops, reading glasses …..

I’ll be home by noon. Depending on the weather, I expect to use the rest of this week to decompress from Beijing, finish an human resources project, plan for a workshop in Bangalore early next month, write my keynote for the Folio show in Chicago, and think about, but not commit to a final week or two of summer vacation around the end of September on the Vineyard (highly unlikely). Long weekend is here, my two oldest are already back at college, youngest starts high school in a week or so. Weird, it’s going to be like coming to home to the fairgrounds after the circus has left town, some evidence of the party will remain, some scraps blowing across the midway, but no clowns or performers …..

So, friends and colleagues. You can safely phone me now without worrying if you will be waking me up.

I was scheduled to meet Sam Flemming from CIC Data, the top China social media consulting and monitoring company at 2 pm today, but spaced out and was on my way to Tien’amen Square to snap some shots and buy a new 50 mm 1.8 portrait lens. I got an email from a colleague telling me I was in serious hot water for blogging about how I was conning Beijing cabbies into taking the special Olympic lanes on the ring roads on the basis of my ordinary yellow IOC/BOCOG security pass placed on the dashboard. Since there was a URL of a site that apparently was linking to me – www.accreditationabuse.com (no such site exists of course, but I am gullible as well as a flaming doofus) – I flew back to my hotel room to do damage control. I got into the room, fired up the PC, and there was a direct Tweet from Sam confirming our 2 pm which we had scheduled a month ago.

Whoops. Right. That meeting. As I sent a direct tweet back to Sam and checked my email it dawned on me that I was the victim of a classic jape at the hands of my colleagues who watched me wrestle all last week with a certain entity which shall not be mentioned. They knew I was paranoid and a perfect sitting duck for a practical joke. Got me. Nice.

I call Sam and Sam is in the hotel already getting ready to have lunch in the mall with Kaiser Kuo – he of my top ten resolutions for Beijing list, founding member of China’s first heavy metal band, the Tang Dynasty, and premier Sino-Social blogger and interactive expert from Ogilvy. So I invited myself to finally meet Kaiser.

We did dim sum, told stories, I learned a pantload about SMM and interactive trends – like more in the course of a lunch than in three years of China watching from the States. Then we got onto one topic of another and that led to my saying I wished I could meet the Imagethief, (blog won’t load for me due to a neverbeforeseen “compression” error) Will Moss, with whom I’ve swapped mutual admiration links in the past. Aha, Will works in the same plaza as the hotel, so Kaiser dialed him up and within the hour we were all sitting in the coffee shop yakking it up some more.

Will Moss, Sam Flemming, and Kaiser Kuo

Will brought along Ben Ross, who has been blogging about his experiences as a shampoo/massage boy in a Chinese barber shop. (The kind with scissors, Will and Kaiser were keen to point out). Pretty wild stuff.

This was a great way to spend my second to last afternoon, and after we broke up I made my way to the Nikon dealership, bought the lens, then walked back through Tien’amen and the back streets to the hotel. Off to the farewell staff party, then I pack. Tomorrow will have to be souvenir day. No rowing at Shunyi – the course is locked down in preparation for the Paralympics which begin this week. Thanks to Sam, Kaiser and Will for the nice reception, makes me want to move to China all the more.

Drew Ginn was the athlete I went to first, the blogging gold medal winning rower from Australia, who, with his partner and childhood friend Duncan Free were going to repeat their success in past Games with a gold at Shunyi. Drew personified the kind of athlete that I wanted in the Voices of the Summer Olympics program, an avid blogger, photographer, vlogger. An athlete who understood del.icio.us, who knew how to present a story and build connections with fans. I tracked him down and one night late last winter we spoke on Skype. He was a little wary — rowers don’t get a lot of sponsors — but after some explanation he said, “I’m in.”

And so we were started, with a great paradigm of an athlete to show to other recruits as a model to follow.

Last night Drew sadly watched the closing ceremonies from the Athlete Village, incapacitated by a back injury, the bane of elite oarsmen. He’s facing surgery. He’s facing retirement. His final posts from the Games are a bittersweet reminder of the sacrifice and glory of competition at the very top of the scale. I wanted to post this to say “thanks Drew”; thanks for kicking off one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever been associated with. And to the other 99 athletes, words fail me. You delivered an insider’s view of the Games that has never before been made available. I don’t think the Games will ever be the same again.

“This has been the most amazing experience. The games, our performance, others performances, the support, the expectations, the conditions, wonderful reactions, failure, crushing moments, elation, and family and friends. The list goes on and on but from where I have sat it has blown me away and even with the pain of my back now become an increasing concern as to my longer term health, I am still buzzing and excited and about everything that I have seen and been part of. In fact it is as if I can not type fast enough.”

Drew Ginn.

No fireworks and fan dancers for me. No way. I ate large with my buddies and caught the end of the show on TV. I’ll buy the DVD and watch it this winter when it’s nasty outside. Tomorrow is a day off! Going to go find some serious Chinese olympic garb (rowing shirts, baseball jerseys), load up on souveniers for the gang, maybe check out some sights with the camera, then hit the big staff party blow out (invitation says it goes until 2).

I can’t believe this is done. Longest three weeks of my life hands down. Need to find something to fill the gap the Olympics filled for the past 20 months of my life.  The next chapter is going to be an interesting one I think.

I copped a last-second ticket to the gold medal game between Spain and the USA, jumped into the VIP van with one of the wealthiest men in India, (bet him 100 rmb the US would conduct a basketball clinic to the tune of a 35 point spread, a bet I lost and which proves I remain the planet’s biggest sports dork). The game was back at Wukesong Stadium (site of yesterday’s gold medal baseball game), and in no time I was walking in the sunshine amongst some rapper types and their ladies.

Nice stadium, classic Lenovo seats — mid-court and up in the first loge. Surrounded by frantic fans of Spain, with a good contingent of loud USA-chanters right behind me.

The game? Ummm….. Basketball after Larry Bird is lost on me.  It’s every man for himself, lots of travelling, and no precision teamwork. The old Bird-Parrish-McHale-Johnson teams of the early 80s …. that’s what I like to watch. But, enough bitching. I was at the last event of these Games and digging it.

Spain came out strong, never permitted the USA Dream Team to walk away with it, and actually led for a good portion of the first quarter. Spanish fans were insane, but for the first time in the past two weeks I actually heard some good old fashioned American fan spirit. This is our Game, so shut up and watch how it’s played.

The crowd was the action — as Fester puts it, leave the action photos to the pros with the Bazooka lenses and focus on people. People are the most interesting thing, and sure enough, that was indeed the case today.

I gave up a chance at a closing ceremony ticket. No sports there, I can see fireworks off of Oyster Harbors on the Fourth of July, and there’s a slim chance Zhang Yimou is going to top his opener (famous last words, I owe the dude from India a hundred yuan because the final margin was like ten points, not 35). I rather get a great dinner at the Xian place Mike Mann showed me last Sunday (I’ve since been back and am on my way there now), could Tsingtaos, some “fried rib” (best f$%%&ing thing I’ve ever eaten), “beef on fire” Guizou-style fried rice …..

I’ll watch the action from the bar on the roof of the Hyatt, check out the fireworks over Tienanmen … then call it a night and the end of these Games. I am ready for a swim on the point of Dead Neck, some rug wrestling with the dogs, and a deep breath of Cape Cod air!

Anthony Lane, usually the film critic at the New Yorker with David Denby, made me literally laugh out loud with his dispatch from the first week in Beijing.

“It was the same at Beijing Airport: the first thing I saw on arrival was a sniffer dog, but instead of some lunging German shepherd, with streaks of Baskerville-style foam along its jaws, there was a beagle. Now, beagles have been sniffing around U.S. airports for years, but this one was chasing a rubber ball. Running behind, at the end of its tether, was the dog’s keeper, laughing gaily, and behind him, somewhere in the seven years since Beijing won the Olympic bid, was a committee dedicated solely to canine propaganda. As long as one mutt-fancier from the tenderhearted West caught sight of the romping beagle and exclaimed to her husband, “Oh, look at little Snu Pi! See, they don’t eat them, they play with them!,” the committee’s job was done.”

Letter from Beijing: The Only Games in Town: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

Yesterday, Saturday, I snuck away for a doubleheader at Wukesong Park for the two medal round baseball games, the last two ball games to be played in the Olympics since the IOC has deigned to drop the sport (along with softball) thanks to a deadlock vote of 52-52. Baseball was on my pre-Games set of resolutions, and I am glad I got out to the western edge of the city to see the last games before they are gone. It is pointless to get into a comparison pissing match with “sports” that entail music, costumes, and judging. But I get pretty depressed when I look up at the television and see synchronized swimming instead of an epic pitching duel between Cuba and the USA.

International baseball is a strange beast. Of the truly global sports – football (soccer), Formula 1 racing, basketball – baseball has always had fervent support in a few farflung countries where the USA made itself known, but it is probably never going to expand much further than it has already. The Japanese are ardent fans thanks to their post-WWII introduction to besi-boru by the occupying forces under General MacArthur. Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean picked it up prior to Castro (who was a player himself). Taiwan consistently shows up at the Little League World Series and kicks ass. These Games marked China’s debut, but as my Chinese colleagues warned me last winter, baseball doesn’t have a chance in a country focused on events it can get a gold medal in, and football, their pervasive passion.

On the flight to Beijing from Dulles I sat in the second deck lounge of the United 747 with the coaches of the American team and overheard their general manager call the ultimate gold medalist, Korea. Last night I saw his prediction come true as the Koreans took on Cuba and won the gold 4-3 before a nutty mob of Korean fans at Wukesong. Earlier in the day I saw a better game between the USA and Japan for the bronze – though truth be told the Japanese deserve the gold for fan spirit – they had cheerleaders with whistles leading them in “Go Go Nippon !” chants for nearly every minute of the nine-innings, unflagging even after the USA extended their lead to four runs in the seventh inning.

Olympic baseball is a weird, indeed like most other western experiences transplanted to the East, hallucinatory experience. The sports organ guy, the snippets of rock and roll get-psyched music, the 7^th inning rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” …. At least there was beer served and lots of it. I think the fans were pretty sophisticated and knew what was going on (reports said some Chinese fans were confused by the rules and didn’t know how to follow the game, cheering foul balls ((heck I cheer foul balls from time to time)). I would have had programs, I would have displayed some meaningful stats on the boards (pitcher’s percentages, pitch count, more batting averages, and for heaven’s sake the lineup), and skipped the obligatory appearance of the oh-so-cute Fuwa mascots.

The real action, as always, was in the stands. I continue to applaud the spirit of the Asian country’s spectators. These are truly their hometeam games and they are making the most of it. I wore my Dice-K Matsusaka Red Sox t-shirt with pride, and on my way of the USA-Japan game at least six Japanese spectators came up to me and shook my hand, beaming and repeating: “Dick-K Yes! Hideki Yes!” Boston was the only team represented on hats and shirts in the immediate vicinity of my seats. Interesting how a couple world championships will extend a brand. One Korean fan in a Green Celtics wifebeater screamed at me: “Go Go Gadget ARMS!!!!” in reference to the long-limbed Kevin Garnett.

So, now it’s all done and the temporary stands at Wukesong are going to be dismantled. Maybe we’ll see baseball rise gain in 2016. Let’s see which city gets the nod. If it is Tokyo or Chicago I’ll bet we witness the second coming of Olympic Baseball.

A big rule in community relations — don’t ask the Chinese government to go fish for the identity of someone posting bullshit about your brand.

“NIKE on Tuesday issued a strong denial of Internet rumours that it forced Chinese athletics hero Liu Xiang to pull out of the Olympics, adding it had asked authorities to investigate the posting.

‘The posting is a malicious rumour, and has not only misled netizens, but also seriously damages the company’s reputation,’ Nike, one of Liu’s major sponsors, said in a statement emailed to AFP.

‘We have immediately asked relevant government departments to investigate those that started the rumour.‘[emp. mine]

Nike denies web rumours it forced Liu to abandon race.

CC BBaunauch

Thanks to our partner Google (host of our Olympic Podium http://2008.lenovo.com and our preferred blog provider for our blogging athletes) for featuring a ton of bloggers in the Voices of the Summer Olympics program on their Blogs of Note page.

Almost all of the blogs on this list are in the Lenovo program!

• Elise Marcotte

• Drew Ginn
• Simon Whitfield
• Carissa Gump
• Dave Durante
• Abhinav Bindra
• Heather Petrie
• Jackie Edwards

some of the athletes I’ve spoken to are very honored to be on this. Thanks Google!

I spent yesterday (Wednesday, Beijing) in our International i.Lounge in the Athlete’s Village playing the social media expert to any and all who would listen. I really get charged up hanging around elite jocks — they’re young for the most part, completely dedicated, excited, and grateful for the experience. I find any proximity to that is kicking a lot of cynicism out of me to the wayside.

Tatyana Lebedeva from Russia came by and asked me to help her set up a blog to accompany the website she has already launched.  We signed her up for a Google account, enabled a blog on blogger (tatyanalebedeva.blogspot.com), Skyped her significant other with the details, watched him via video check it out, wrote down the passwords, and were done. Fastest blog launch in my personal history. In the course of the sign up I learned she won a silver medal in the triple-jump.

Then I got to meet one of the bloggers in the Lenovo Voices of the Summer Olympics program, Canadian high jumper Nicole Forrester who blogs at Soaring to Excellence. She needed a new IdeaPad so I swapped her Y510 for a sleek U110 and our interactive media expert and iLounge manager, Sheji Ho, offered to perform a data transfer. Nicole and I talked about stuff for a half hour, me nervous to keep her staying too long as she was getting psyched for her big competition. She’s tall. Like really tall. Taller than me tall. She told me the story of the opening ceremony, of singing O Canada! in the tunnel leading out to the field, and reminded me that none of the athletes got to watch Zhang Yimou’s opening theatrics because they were waiting outside for their parade of champions.

Then I met a journalist from Uganda and we talked about getting his country’s delegation online and blogging.

Finally I got to meet Sanani Mangisa, who plays on the South African field hockey team. She loves to blog and was very complimentary about the entire blogging program, Lenovo’s iLounge, tech support, and overall goodwill.

I left feeling great about things and wished we could have done this for more athletes. It’s obvious athlete blogging is here to stay.

…. of leaving early? Like tomorrow? There’s a shot I can get out of here before the planned depart on Tuesday. I am torn. Things are settling down, no more press stuff, the final wave of guests are checking in today. I just need to write a few more posts, get the big one done about how we powered the Games and maybe, just maybe I can sit on Dead Neck this weekend and read a book and work on my sunburn.

update: i’m going to hang in through Tuesday and stick to the plan. Off to the gold medal game in women’s soccer tonight with the gang from the war room.

I suppose I still have time to knock off another of my Olympic resolutions — take in a baseball game before the sport is retired from the Olympic line up — but time is running short and it sounds pretty funereal out there at Wukesong. I do have my Dice-K Matsuzaka Red Sox t-shirt ready to go and would definitely have no problem sitting in the bleachers with a Tsingtao and a Fenway Wukesong Frank. My buddy Da Qian hit a game yesterday, had tix, but I was doing a blogger meeting at the iLounge. Report to follow.

As the end nears, there isn’t much joy at Wukesong Baseball Field. In the early rounds the atmosphere was sepulchral. One game, between South Korea and China, pulled in fewer than 1,000 fans. On Tuesday, about 6,000 showed up to watch the team from the place usually known as Taiwan (Chinese Taipei here) play the U.S. Paying customers were stuck in the outfield. Infield seats were reserved for the press and the “Olympic Family,” both in near-complete non-attendance.

Olympic Baseball’s Two-Week Wake – WSJ.com.

bummer, I just figured out I have been dinged from the Head of the Charles Regatta — no sculling for me. Now I need to slime a seat in a team boat. Anybody need a near sighted ambidextrous rower with a 6:30 2K?

Belly shirts: when it is hot a certain species of middle-aged Chinese guys roll their shirts up from the bottom under their arms, exposing their mid-sections to the cooling breezes. This is a good look, especially when flip-flops are involved and the guy has a paunch.

Diapers: Nah, slit the back of the shorts and Junior lets fly whenever and wherever the inspiration strikes.

Gatoraid: has nothing on Pocari Sweat. This is a key sport drink from Japan. The big beverage in a can is tea – a sweet tea in a red can with yellow characters that tastes an awful lot like the sweet tea at the Bojangles on Airport Boulevard in Morrisville near the Hooters.

Napkins: are in short supply and when found usually come wrapped in paper envelopes, or are furnished in the form of Kleenex in a table-top dispenser. This paucity of face wipes leads to sticking the food bowl right under the chin and shovel-slurping as required.

Lo-Flo Toilets: There isn’t a Beijing toilet that I cannot clog. These things are more temperamental than a marine head on an old sailboat. I look at one funny and it overflows.

Clothing lust: I must depart with a Chinese Olympic Baseball team jersey. Red, big yellow dragon, and China in flowing script. Just the thing for the Fenway bleachers.

Speaking of which …. How awesome is MLB.com and archives of last week’s insane ball game between the Red Sox and the Texas Rangers with ten runs in the first inning alone? Watching Red Sox in China is a serious Masshole’s guilty pleasure. I saw a guy in a Celtics jersey outside of a roast duck joint and heard someone say “Jeezum crow, it’s hot” which was last heard by Cousin Pete at a Maine wedding a few years ago in a old, unairconditioned church. I heard it on the Olympic Green from a fat lady and almost introduced myself.

Engrish: most sad to see the Temple of Mangled English, the Dongda Hospital of Diseases of the Anus and Intestine get renamed to the Donga Proctological and Intestinal Disease Hospital because it got made fun of in the New York Times. Speaking of Engrish, the Chinese get every much as loud a laugh out of translating Chinese character tattoos on trendy Los Angeles celebrities.

Food engrish: Shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. “Meat salad” (I passed), “Mud Crab” (so delicious sounding), “Fungus” (mushrooms).. All I care is the guy in the VIP lounge can turn out a nice egg white omelet but the ladies will not let me get my own coffee. We have Italian Meat Sauce flavored Lay’s Potato Chips in the War Room (Le Chambre de la Guerre).

Hello Dudes: there are six people in the hallway who say hello to me every time I walk to and fro. This happens ten times a day, they know who I am. And they know it bugs me. I give them a new greeting every time I pass. Gruezi, Sup, Sappenen, Hola, Howdy, howareya ….

Neck ribbons: everybody has a pass around their neck. Now the taxi loaders at the hotel have them too. I think they felt left out.

Dutchmen: The Dutch Orangemen of Holland, Netherlands get team spirit award. I think a sizable percentage went to the Silk Market and had orange suits made for $100. There was an orange Dumb and Dumber tuxedo at the rowing finals. Brazilians, Russians are also very vocal. Americans – not so much – not a good time to be a loud American but I have no problem when the occasion calls for it. In fact, I know for a fact I am the loudest American because a lady asked me to please be quiet when I retold a secondhand story of someone seeing a gymnast’s name on the display “Fukin, A.” and she thought I was crudely agreeing with someone using the South Boston declarative form of the affirmative.

The Olympic Lane: All the spy novels set in Cold War Moscow talk about the special lane reserved for the limousines of the Party Elite (in order to underscore the contradiction of privilege in a classless society I suppose). Well, that’s back in Beijing. Olympic Rings have been painted in the fast lane for vehicles with special passes. Half the fun is convincing the average cabby that one’s yellow IOC card is indeed a license to drive like a lunatic in the Ring Lane. Or for that matter, one’s step-sister. Cabbies love it when I throw my pass up onto their dash and they use it to bullshit the traffic cops that, yes, Henry Kissinger is in the cab and needs to meet the Premier.

Seriously: I could live and work here. This city gets me psyched.

I’m going to the athlete village in a few hours to hang out (1600 to 1800, Wednesday) and be the resident geek for any athletes who want some advice on how to launch a blog and use Web 2.0 tools to tell their stories, share their experiences and build their careers – athletic or professional or both. Figuring it would be good to actually think about the topic before arriving in our International iLounge, I thought I’d post some thoughts and seek some input from my faithful readers.

Why would an athlete blog? I can’t speak for anybody else’s motivation, I know I am propelled by an itch to write, a raging ego, and an inner nerd that likes to mess around with new stuff. But if I project myself into the Nikes of a 25 year-old elite athlete, I would be looking for the following:

1. Recognition. The investment of time, practice, and pain is considerable. An athlete performing at the world level is sacrificing school, career, and free time to train, travel and compete. The first return, at the very least, should be acknowledgment of that sacrifice.
2. Support. A blog is an excellent way to provide supporters with a channel to leave their cheers and questions. Those supporters can be a family many time zones away, friends and alumni from former lives, a former teacher, fellow teammates, and sponsors
3. Sponsorship. As brands invest in athletes they are going to make blogging a requirement. Whether the sponsor provides editorial and technical support, or a sports marketing agency offers it, or a sport federation (like USRowing) gets in on the action, high visibility athletes will see blogging show up in their contracts more than ever. For an athlete seeking financial support (and most are), a blog is the single most effect way to get recognition and attention to one’s cause, particularly in the non-mainstream sports that have fierce sets of fans, but no attention from the mainstream sporting press.
4. Satisfaction: for some people, not all, a blog and all that goes with it can be a very personally gratifying experience. It is not for everybody, but for people who like to write, who like to photograph, who have fun with a video camera, who like to build connections and relationships through technology … well, I personally regard this stuff as one of the highlights of my day, but I’m an old reporter who like to write and needs to share it. Some athletes will love it, others will dread it. But ….

Enough preamble, now to the practical 1-2-3 steps to follow. Loyal readers can skip this. But for someone coming to this stuff for the first time, here’s the basics:

1. Permission. Does your sport or event have any rules regarding blogging by athletes? Find that out first. The IOC has guidelines for all sorts of athlete activities and I would counsel a would-be sports blogger to read them, understand them, discuss them with an agent, attorney, parent, or friend. The first thing is not to do anything that would endanger one’s eligibility or permission to participate.
2. Blogs: do-it-yourself or quick-and-dirty. A DIY blog offers some better branding if you can register yourname-dot-com. If the athlete has a technical background or inclination, a self-hosted blog can be both fun and frustrating. For the rest of us, there are several excellent free hosted blog services such as Google’s Blogger. WordPress. Typepad. Etc. My advice – ask around, a lot of Lenovo’s athletes went with Blogger. I am a WordPress guy (self-hosted). The registration process is drop-dead simple. So, open the blog first – everything else (pictures, videos) plugs into it. Pick the name carefully, make it something that can be easily communicated verbally and remembered (if you have business cards have the address printed on them).
3. Tools of the trade: get a good PC (an IdeaPad or ThinkPad with a SD slot for the little camera card: any athlete who wants a discount should find me for my discount code).
   1. Software – pretty much a web browser is all that is needed. Some photo software can’t hurt (Adobe Photoshop Elements is a great tool, but $$$).
   2. Video – definitely look at the PureDigital FlipCam – at $150 with an hour’s capacity and no software or wires, it is a good tool but terrible on recording audio outdoors.
   3. Camera – a decent (3+ million megapixel) digital camera is key.
4. Accounts: along with the blog two other accounts are needed for putting pictures and videos into a blog. For Photos – there are a ton of solutions. Google Picasa is good if one is a “Googly Person,” Flickr is my photo host of choice. Both have little tools that allow one to easily upload photos right onto one’s account. So, after lighting up a blog, light up a photo service. Then go to YouTube and register for an account there. All of this stuff is free. (Flickr Pro account permits unlimited uploads for a small annual fee)

Now, what to write about? How often? What works? What doesn’t?

I wish I had an easy answer. A lot has been written about “how to blog” – some people are very focused and particular about what they write and put a lot of care into it. Typos, misspellings … I am relaxed about such stuff and have a tendency to publish first and correct later. Topics? You can take on the world’s issues, you can talk about what you just had for dinner (actually diet is probably a fascinating issue for many athletes to share and discuss). Just be interesting. Relax. It’s only the entire world that can read it!

I would emphasize:

• brevity (which I am not doing in this post)
• bullets – put your points into little chunks like this
• pictures (people like to see some images in the middle of a big snake of text)

Comments and Community

The blog is launched, it has a few posts about the upcoming competition. The design is nice. Some pictures are posted. People are now figuring out it exists. How? Well, first you tell the world by linking to other bloggers in your sport. Think about blogs as a big …. Web …. Of interconnected blogs. You link to one blog that blogger will be notified automatically (it’s called a trackback), you comment on another blog and happen to drop your blog’s address in there ….. Building an audience is about building connections. That’s a topic for another discussion in more detail.

As the audience arrives, so will the comments. Your mother will probably post the first one. Or a teammate. Or a coach. Reply. Say hi. Read your comments. Check them religiously. Don’t pay attention to jerks, anonymous idiots, or spammers. Delete them.

Be aware the press is going to discover your blog. As an ex-reporter I can attest that reporters love a good quote and like the rest of us their search begins on Google. If they need a quote from a water polo goalie and the blog is “optimized” correctly, expect a phone call or an email.

Sponsors and branding

Your sponsor is going to want some recognition, maybe your sport’s federation as well. Help them out. Put their logos on the blog. Give them some recognition and they will appreciate it. If they are like Lenovo they will also help pull this altogether, but I would advise, in fact demand, that ghostwriting and management of the blog by another person, especially a sponsor, not be permitted. If you have a PR person, sure, have them help. But don’t let a sponsor or any third party put words in public that you didn’t write or at least approve yourself. Readers can sense that from a distance and to invoke the Social Media Cliché – it’s gotta be authentic.

Summary:

1. It’s fun. Keep it that way and you’ll keep it alive.
   
2. It’s cheap. Don’t spend money on it.
   
3. It takes patience. A lot of traffic and recognition won’t happen overnight. Don’t do it for the numbers.
   
4. It’s better than a diary or a scrapbook. It’s your blog and it’s yourself made digital and shared online with the world.
   
5. People care. Sports is one of the planet’s universal passions. We’re all fans at some level. This is how we can all get out of the stands, out from behind the television and reach out and actually touch the most important people of all – you, the athletes. To hear Elle Logan tell the story of her gold medal race, of the strategy, the inside jokes, the move they made at 1000 meters. NBC and EuroSport can’t tell that tale. Only you can. Tell it!
   

Mister O’Grady is on vacation in Wellfleet, and posts an excellent discussion on the state of shellfishing, invasive species, and other bellwethers of coastal life. Good fodder for the lagging clamming content lately. I have seen no Chinese clams yet.

“What I did on the Day Two of my vacation: visited an oyster farm in Wellfleet, MA. For serious. These sustainable – “call it green, sustainable, whatever you want” said one oyster farmer today – shellfish fisheries are an interesting canary in the coal mine in several respects. As we’ll see.”

tecosystems » What I Learned Today: Shellfish, Fisheries, Oil, and More.