The Winter Olympics online review: Part 6 - Germany, Canada, and video overview

Over the last week or so I've been reviewing online newspaper coverage of the recent Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. In the final part of this series, I want to look at elements of coverage in Germany and Canada, and present an overview video with some clips of the sites in action.

Discrete Facebook presence from Bild

Bild had added Olympia 2010 to their main navigation.

There was also a prominent promo presence for a German Olympia 2010 group on Facebook.

One of the things that I found very interesting about this is that above the fold on Facebook it was not branded 'Bild' at all.

It is only lower down the page that the association with Germany's biggest tabloid paper becomes clear.

The Bild site also had a Flash interactive. this included live text coverage, and the Bild Backstage section which I mentioned when looking at Twitter coverage of the games on Wednesday.

Bild also offered the enticing promise of 'Sportstätten in 3-D'. Rather than donning some special glasses, however, this appeared to just be schematics of buildings turned at a slight angle to add some perspective.

Staying in Germany, sueddeutsche.de also offered a 'live-ticker' portal. This was made up of lots of elements in one fixed size pop-up, which didn't work too well on my Mac, as I wasn't able to scroll around to see all of the content.

The host nation - Canada

I couldn't really do an online review of coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics without looking at the media in the host country of Canada, which I did during the final couple of days before the games got started.

National Post had an unobtrusive and minimally designed banner across the top of the site. This linked through to a co-branded CBC / National Post 'Vancouver Now' site.

This offered a chance to directly message athletes from the Canadian team

although I have to say that if your forum software needs a legend this large to explain the varieties of the icons that might appear, you probably need to re-evaluate your feature set and have clearer icons!

With 3 days to go until the start of the games, The Globe And Mail had not added Olympics to their sports navigation or featured topics. Clicking on links to stories about Vancouver took the user to the CTV Vancouver 2010 site.

This is something that would be quite unusual in the UK - one can't imagine, for example, football stories on The Sun's website linking directly through to Sky Sports branded content, or The Times coverage of the Olympics being handled by Sky News.

And finally...

Here is a video overview highlighting some of the features I've been pointing out during this series, along with a somewhat under-rehearsed commentary where I pronounce the names of all the European newspapers badly...