Prepare Your Feed Reader for The Olympic Games – Places To Track Results Online via RSS

Now that Beijing is almost ready for the opening ceremony, I guess for all the sports fans (or those of us who only turn into sports fans for the Olympics) it is time to get ready and prepare our feed readers for The Games. While Wired offers a selection of places to watch the Games online, I am sure that not everyone has the time to actually watch everything so I have collected a few places where you can grab feeds to track all the Olympic results via RSS without spending all your time watching news and live broadcast on TV or online.

First of all I think it will be useful to bookmark the schedule for all the games at the official Beijing-2008 site (you will also be able to see the number of medals to be competed for on this page as well).

Unfortunately the official page with the latest news does not offer a ready-made RSS feed to subscribe to but I have used the tool that I always use in such cases - Ponyfish - and created a feed for everyone to use should you want to consume news from official sources (hope they will forgive me for finding a way not to refresh their site constantly).

On the official Beijing 2008 site you can also read the news and results categorized by different sports (there are too many of them so I decided not to generate a feed for each of them but I’m sure that if you are a fan of a particular sport, this will be a helpful addition).

Unlike the official Beijing Games site, the International Olympic Committee is generous enough to provide us with quite a selection of RSS feeds to choose from, starting with general news of the committee and to the news related to the future Olympic Games (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012). What we need for the Olympic news and results in the coming days is the feed for Beijing 2008 and maybe the Committee news from Beijing as well.

Obviously there are a number of mainstream news outlets that will offer broad coverage for Olympic Games and their results.

Yahoo! Sports has a dedicated page that presents the Olympic results in a visually pleasing way and also offers an RSS feed for all the Games-related news. What’s more, they also offer a counter for medals for all the participating countries.

BBC Sport features a page where you will be able to follow the Olympics in real-time - they will provide video, text and chat there. But if you are not into watching the games in real-time, even if it’s in from of your computer instead of your TV, they also offer a feed for you. Besides, BBC even has a special blog on the Olympics that you can also subscribe to for some more personalized view.

In addition to offering the much-discussed live videos for the Games, NBC also features a selection of RSS feeds if you prefer text format for your quick news.

USA Today is mostly generous about blogs on the topic and it even suggests us one author who will be tweeting the various events from Beijing. An interesting service offered here is subscription to the most important news of your choice via SMS. You can choose various sports, daily Olympic news or you can subscribe to receive notifications only for the medals won by your country. And of course there’s an RSS feed available as well for all the news from Beijing Games.

I believe that you will easily choose a feed or two from your preferred media outlet or from the official resources. But for us the social media addicts Twitter will probably be the ultimate tool to get the latest news and the best way to do just that is by using Summize - here is a feed to track the word “Olympic” on Twitter - though even now it seems to be too popular for anyone to be able to track everything.

And finally if you prefer to get your news by constantly refreshing FriendFeed, I think the most convenient way to track Olympics there is either by subscribing to the results of a search on FriendFeed for Olympic or by joining one of the rooms dedicated to the Games - either Beijing Olympics or OlympicNuts. Both groups are clearly under-populated and could both use some sources of news (the first one only features stories submitted by members while the latter is simply updated with the feed for the Olympic news from Yahoo sport) but hopefully the administrators of the groups will acknowledge the problem and will add some more news to their groups for FriendFeed users to enjoy (probably those I’ve collected in this post).

Enjoy your reading and don’t forget to find time to watch at least some of the most exciting moments!