Personal Media Drive

Olympic Committee Sets Social Media Rules for Athletes

The International Olympic Committee is looking to leverage social media drive engagement with the global sporting event, in part by encouraging competitors to "post, blog and tweet their experiences" during the upcoming summer Olympics in London, scheduled to take place July 16-August 15, 2012. The possibility of interacting with athletes, or at least hearing their thoughts first-hand, is an obvious attraction for spectator sports -- but the IOC is also at pains to protect the commercial interests of broadcast and merchandising partners.

Accordingly, athletes won't be allowed to use social media, including Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs, for advertising, selling products, or sharing videos from the Olympic venues. The IOC instructions read: "Postings, blogs or tweets should be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist. Participants and other accredited persons cannot post any video and/or audio of the events, competitions or any other activities which occur at Olympic venues." In other words, people who want to actually see what athletes did will have to tune in on TV, or an associated online property. Furthermore, no website URLs may contain the words "Olympic" or "Olympics" in their primary domain name without approval from the IOC.

Acknowledging the potential for trash-talking, the IOC also discouraged athletes from commenting on their opponents, and urged them to conform with the general "spirit" of the Olympics; thus all social media posts should "be dignified and in good taste, and not contain vulgar or obscene words or images." But again the focus is on showing the personal, human side of the competition, the IOC emphasized: "Apart from that, we want people to share as much as possible their personal experience of the games."

The IOC said the new rules are being formulated ahead of time to avoid the kind of confusing situation which arose during the 2010 Vancouver games, when some athletes assumed there was a social media blackout. Others were concerned that brands appearing on their home pages (who weren't official Olympic sponsors) might violate the events' sponsorship agreements.

I've always thought it was a good idea to let athletes tweet and otherwise update social media during games, provided it's done in a way that doesn't violate the rules, give an unfair advantage, or allow cheating. But many professional sports organizations aren't so sure. For example, previously I wrote about the fact that NFL players who use social media during a game are liable for a $25,000 fine. This is part of a communications blackout which decrees players may not use cell phones, electronic devices, or social media including Twitter or Facebook within 90 minutes of kickoff.

HP Personal Media Drive not recognized - Tech Support Forum

I have a HP Media Center PC. Model m7470n. I am running windows XP SP3. My computer is 5 years old. Until recently it worked fine. I bought this model strictly because it had a removable USB harddrive that allows you to remove and install it in a drive bay on the front of the PC without having to power down the PC or disconnect it via "safely remove hardware" icon. I inserted it as usual in it's drive bay but instead of coming up as usual, an error message came saying usb device not recognized. I have googled this problem many times. It seems to be a fairly common problem, but so far I have not seen anyone resolve it. HP support is useless on this subject. I paid a lot of money on this machine just to have the removable drive and now it would appear I wasted my money. I have tried everything to resolve the problem but with no success. I tried to get updated drivers for the drive but HP no longer appears to support Windows XP, only Vista or Windows 7. The only logical reason I can think of is a bad motherboard or possibly a bad cable from the bay to the motherboard. But I don't know where you could get a replacement. I have changed my hardrive just to see if maybe I had a virus, but although it did appear to correct some othere weird HP stuff it didn't fix that. I did get it to work once or twice by uninstalling it and reinstalling it, but it always goes back to not recognizing the drive. If it is a faulty cable, where can I get one? Anyone's help would be much appreciated...thanks I understand what you are saying, however I am very sure it is not the media drives. I have 3 of them and they all do the same thing. They all work on other computers and they all work on this computer, just not in the media bay for which they were designed to work in. I wouldn't even be posting on this forum if HP support could do what you expect them to do and that is support their product. Like most problems, it is usually a process of elimination. Having said that the only way to be sure what my problem is. Is to change out the motherboard, which just isn't practical or replace the cable assembly that goes from the drive bay to the motherboard. Something I am not sure if HP has them or if they are not available because the PC is 5 years old. Like I mentioned, I have been dealing with this issue for over 6 months. I google it periodically to see if someone has come up with a solution. So far not yet, but thank you for your input. I appreciate it.

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