Posted at Global Notions

The unthinkable happened yesterday at the National Stadium and hundreds of millions of Chinese fans across the country were finally brought back to reality during what has been an Olympics marked by national celebration.  Not only has China clearly dominated the individual sports (minus swimming) which has provided them an insurmountable lead in the gold medal race, but the Games themselves have been an overwhelming success to both their national and international audiences.  Air quality is great, volunteers are perfect, no spitting, no pushing, taxis are clean, food is splendid, venues are spectacular, no protests, greatest Olympics ever, the last iconic Olympics; all comments one can read in the news or hear in the streets around Beijing and throughout the world.  Yet, in the midst of all the good, China’s sport’s god will not be performing miracles this Olympics.

Liu Xiang had the weight of a nation on his shoulders leading up to the Beijing Olympics.  I posted this advertisement that has been running in China all summer as a reminder of the heights one can rise to (or be thrust to) in the rapidly modernizing, individualizing China.  At the end, the viewer sees a Chinese athlete being lifted by the nation to the top pedestal of a medal stand.  The athlete remains faceless, yet there should be no doubt.  He is Liu Xiang, China’s famous hurdler, a national hero.  If you watch the advertisement again, you might notice that the first three athletes all play in team sports (basketball, soccer and volleyball) and that the nation is helping them only to perform various skills required by their sport.  However, the country is lifting Liu Xiang, an individual, to the gold medal pedestal.  This is a powerful image in a country where rapid social change is the norm.

During an interview after Liu Xiang failed to run his preliminary race, a journalist asked why the public had not been warned about the chances of Liu Xiang not being able to compete.  His coach replied that they never had doubts.  While I find this hard to believe, it is indicative of a society that is beginning to accept individual success as THE true measure of success.  Liu Xiang had been hurt most of the running season with a hamstring injury and it’s highly unlikely his Achilles problem suddenly appeared the day of his race.  Yet the general population was allowed to continue to place the hopes and dreams of a nation on an individual athlete, despite reality.  When his body failed, and thus him in relation to the Olympics, it is not surprising that one would see a national outpouring of sorrow and disappointment.

Not since Michael Vick’s dog Boom-Boom won back-to-back Atlanta dog fighting championships has one man or beast lived up to the hype of Michael Phelps. Winning eight Olympic gold medals is impressive, but to do it in one Olympics is simply amazing. Jason Zimdars, a local celebrity, said “Wow that is neat, did you hear Brett Favre got traded?” when asked about the feat.

Phelps had everyone watching the Olympics this year. They wanted to know if he could do it. Stephen Vandervort said, “I Brightkited right when he won so that I can look back in the future and remember where I was at that moment. See, here is a picture of the T.V. I was watching.”

During an interview after the race Phelps was asked his favorite memory and he was speechless. He said that the Olympics as a whole is what he would remember. Justin Boeckman said that he already had a Phelps website made that has in his own words, “Michael Phelps hidden in white text at the bottom of the page written 46 times so that I can get it ranked really high!”

It could be shear talent or talent and technology combined that has helped all of these world records to be broken by Phelps and company. The new Speedo Racer suits seem to be helping everyone. “Those suits are simple, black and real clean,” stated Dustin Evans, “I was yelling Git-R-Done at Phelps the whole time.”

This may be a feat we never see again in our lifetime. I am glad Michael Phelps lived up to the hype and won 8 Olympic gold medals in one Olympic games. Congrats, and thanks for making this a fun Olympics to watch.

A fan of Brett Favre just created a website to help show the Green Bay Packers it was a mistake to trade away Brett Favre.  The site says, “Let’s show Packers management that they made a mistake, trading away the best player in franchise history.”

The premise behind the site is to get people to buy a New York Jets Brett Favre jersey and wear it to the games.  There will still be green all around in the stadium, but it will be the wrong green.

As the http://www.favrefanprotest.com website says, “Together we can change the green in Green Bay!”

Many of you have heard of Shazam, the little iPhone app that will tell you the song that is playing on the radio after listening to it for ten to fifteen seconds, but little has been said about Midomi.  It offers more features the Shazam, but is it really the choice for you when you need a song guessed?

Midomi has added features such as saying an artist’s name or saying the name of a song, but the feature they really want to set it apart is the ability to sing or hum a song and let it find it for you.  They suggest singing or humming ten seconds or more for the best results.  I decided to do a little testing of this.  I sang Lodi Dodi by Slick Rick, and later covered by Snoop Dogg, for a good 24 seconds .  As you can see in the image below not one of my results have anything to do with Lodi Dodi.

The next feature I tested was Midomi’s search based on a saying a song title.  I had a little more success with this.  I simply said Lodi Dodi and it searched around for it.  You can see it found a live version of Lodi Dodi by Slick Rick, but it is misspelled, the second and third results are not correct, and there is no Snoop Dogg version in sight.  I could however listen to the song right here from the results.  I am impressed by that feature.

I decided to give Midomi a shot to go directly head to head with Shazam when listening to music playing from iTunes.  I played the first 20 seconds of the Lodi Dodi by Snoop Dogg.  I was surprised that it brought back no results.

I decided to test this same clip of the song using Shazam.  It has one simple feature and it does it well.  It listens to the music and then tells you what it is, simple as that.  I played the first 10 seconds of Lodi Dodi and Shazam, pun intended, it found it.

Midomi has a future, possibly a very bright future.  The best part about it is that if it does find the song you are looking for you can play it right there from the application.  With a little more time and updates I think Midomi will become a better app and could surpass Shazam in popularity simply because it offers more.  For now Shazam is still the program to get to guess your music from the radio or TV.

Now I have not tried this out yet, but there is a new app out for the iPhone that allows you to update you WordPress blog from your iPhone.

Here is what it is described as:
“Robust but simple to use, the WordPress for iPhone Open Source application allows you to create and edit content on your WordPress blog(s) with support for offline use.”

I am really interested to test this out as I was a little jealous of the Typepad folks who had an app.  Has anyone tried it out yet?

http://iphone.wordpress.org

KOCO is reporting that there sources say the name of the new Oklahoma City NBA franchise will the the Oklahoma City Thunder.  This goes against a Jason Zimdars post that leaked the name as “I love this basketball team.“  Either way Oklahoma City Thunder sounds like a WNBA team to some.

I personally think this is appropriate for the people that sit up in cloud city, the upper sections properly named loud city.  “I don’t think the name is scary enough,” stated Stephen Vandervort “People don’t run with thunder like the do with the Bulls.  Running with the bulls will scare anyone, so will swimming with sharks, but that is for another story!”

A jersey design scheme and colors are yet to be announced, but it will be intersting to see if they go with a classic, retro, or some kind of combination of both.  Many eager Oklahomans wait for the official name to be announced so they can begin to purchase merchandise and season tickets.

GoDaddy released the .me domain extension to purchase at 11am ET today.  So far it has been a big fail for them.  I was the proud owner of the.me for a total of 1 hour and 6 minutes before I got an email from GoDaddy letting me know that I am not the owner anymore.  According to a Mashable post, on Twitter there are about 7 or 8 owners of aweso.me.  It might be a while before this is all figured out, so it will be interesting to see what GoDaddy does instead of here is a refund, sorry.  I already had a whole business plan in place.

I am all excited when I get this email:

One hour and six minutes later I am sad because I get this:

Did anyone else run into this?  Have you received anymore information from GoDaddy about what is going on?

You’ve got that fingerprinted shiny new iPhone 3G and you are all ready to do everything “Twice as Fast,” except that you are stuck trying to activate it.  So now your phone is doing nothing as you wait around.  Here are some things to do with it while you are waiting.

1. Use it as a see-saw for your fingers.
2. Polish the back to get the fingerprints off.
3. Check out the new app store on your original iPhone you gave to your wife.  Oh wait, it is bricked too.
4. Talk to someone in person.  I know, weird huh?
5. Tell your friends that despite what they have witness so far, it is an awesome phone and worth the wait.
6. Listen to music on your 3rd Generation (3G) iPod.
7. Write a blog post about how mad you are about your iPhone 3G not activating.
8. Polish the back to get the fingerprints off.
9. Ask someone with a Samsung Instinct for directions using their GPS.
10. Read reviews of how awesome it is on your computer.

Seattle is having a bad week.  First Starbucks announced it was closing down 600 Starbucks coffee shops.  Now their NBA team is gone.  There are things that could make it much worse, but this was not a week they will soon forget.

Clay Bennett and company from Oklahoma City won a ruling today that allowed them to break their lease with the city and move the team to Oklahoma City.  Under the agreement, Seattle will keep the SuperSonics’ name and team colors.  Now the scramble in OKC occurs for a team name, colors and logo.  They need this soon so that they can begin to make the merchandising revenue off of sold shirts, jerseys and all other random things that a logo get’s put on.  They also need this so they can begin to sell season tickets and get Oklahomans hyped up!  For more information on Oklahoma City’s new basketball team you can visit their wikipedia page.

The 600 stores that will be closing are their lowest performing shops.  Approximately 70 percent of the stores being closed have opened since the beginning of fiscal 2006.  The stores are not known yet, but this is not good for the Seattle based company.  For some this is some poetic justice because the Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz  headed the group that owned the SuperSonics from 2001to 2006.

Seattle, it will get better.  You still have tons of Starbucks and someday you will get a team.

So today I want to send out some tweets via twitter. Sorry, site down.  So I wait.  I come back an hour later,  sorry, site down again.  I’m not a twitter fiend like some are.  I can go without, but when I wanted to tweet where was it?

Poor Analogy time: Last summer I always went to this snow cone stand.  It had the greatest snow cones.  The hours of service were from 2pm to 11pm daily.  A couple times I went at 9pm and they were closed.  What did I do.  I stopped going.  I couldn’t rely on it when I wanted it most.

Is that what is coming next for twitter.  Are people going to get too tired of it not working that they will stop posting.  I think that will be the case for some.  This guy included.  Will that affect twitter.  I don’t think they will mind the downturn in users temporarily while they get their servers in order.  Then when they are more reliable people will come back.  Maybe even this guy.