The International Olympic Committee is considering lifting its previous blanket ban on athletes blogging, now considering blogs as a “grey area” that warrant further review.

Athletes have previously been banned from blogging under a rule in the Olympic charter which forbids them from partaking in journalism whilst competing at the Olympics, a rule which previously gained attention after the Japanese Olympic Committee forbid its athletes from blogging during the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.

The SMH reports that IOC Athletes Commission Chairman Sergei Bubka has stated that “In principle, the commission is not against [blogging], but it’s quite a delicate issue that we decided to investigate a little bit more”.

Bubka went on to say that although blogging is a modern way for people to express their opinions, he didn’t believe that athletes should be able to blog without “certain rules”, and that blogs raised questions of privacy and potential conflicts with media and television rights….getting to the real heart of the matter, it’s really about the money.

Originally posted on February 7, 2007 @ 5:13 pm

UK based global mobile phone company Vodafone has announced a deal with the News Corp owned MySpace that will see Vodafone customers in the UK having access to the popular social networking site via their mobile phones.

The deal ties MySpace exclusively to Vodafone in the UK market and will help increase the appeal of Vodafone in the key teen and 18-30 marketplace, the core user demographics of MySpace.

The Manchester Evening News quotes a joint release from both companies stating “The partnership will enable millions of Vodafone customers to access MySpace mobile, allowing them to edit their own MySpace profiles, find and add friends, post photos and blogs and send and receive MySpace messages while on the move,”.

No word yet as to whether deal extends into other major markets in which Vodafone has a presence, including Europe, South Africa, Asia and Australia.

 

Tags: MySpace, Vodafone

Originally posted on February 8, 2007 @ 3:28 am

Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, will attend the inaugural ceremony for the virtual Swedish embassy in online game Second Life. With his avatar of course. He told the world, or at least the Swedish speaking part of it, via his blog the other day (in Swedish).

This is of course a PR stunt for Sweden as a country, but still, to have the foreign minister there is a pretty big thing. I would assume that the Second Life community will boost this, as will Linden Labs, since it’s a pretty big thing already.

Also check out our previous coverage of the Swedish embassy in Second Life.

Originally posted on February 8, 2007 @ 4:32 am

Facebook has partnered with Comcast to produce a television series of ten half-hour episodes, entirely composed of user-generated videos. The TV series called “Facebook Diaries” will be shown on Comcast’s YouTube clone, Ziddio as well as on Facebook.

“We’ve been having some dialogue with Comcast for a couple of months just on and off, just as they were putting their video plans together,” Owen Van Natta, chief operating officer of based Facebook, said Tuesday. “Then we engaged R.J. Cutler and we came up with this idea.”

The companies will be asking users to submit videos built around themes such as “who am I?” “heartbreak,” and so on. The move largely mimicks the videoblogging phenomenon and will leverage Facebook’s more than 16 million users to drive traffic to Comcast’s service.

Businessweek has more.

Originally posted on February 7, 2007 @ 3:38 pm

This article is the whitest article I’ve ever read.

Famous Quote I made just tonight: “Digg was so slow tonight I thought the internet had died.”

Chad Randall joins B5 as the Ad Sales Guy , its about time blog networks start thinking about selling some of their inventory. No seriously. The only way to make money is to sell ads.

Speaking of Ads, How to Get People to Click Your Adwords.

Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 7:27 pm