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Beijing 2008 Olympics Medal Count Gadget

Posted by Donavon West at 8/13/2008 12:48:00 AM

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Are you someone who follows the Olympics every hour of the day? Or maybe you just want to keep and eye on who’s leading in the medal count. Either way, the Beijing 2008 Medal Count Vista Sidebar gadget may be for you. It updates every 15 minutes throughout the day and shows the top 5 countries gold, silver and bronze medal counts. Click on the country name or flag to view detailed medal standing on Beijing2008.com.

  1. Click here to download the gadget.
  2. You will see this warning below. Click Save.
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  3. After the gadget downloads, open Windows Explorer to the location that you saved the gadget.
  4. Double click on the file downloaded file Beijing2008.gadget to install the gadget onto the Windows Vista Sidebar.
  5. You will see another warning. Just click Install.
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Do you have a company that needs a gadget written? Contact LiveGadgets.net today.

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12 comments:

pbopenid said on August 13, 2008 5:55 AM ...

This is cool but... not accurate!!! I just installed it and does not show Italy in 5th place with 4 golds and shows Russia 2 golds.

The proper sorting is # of golds then # of silver then # of bronze, not the total number of medals...

 
Mo Mo said on August 13, 2008 8:17 AM ...

The count is correct. Right now Italy ony has 10 medals overall whereas Russia has 12 so theya re ranked higher. You can look here.

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/medals

So the gadget is correct.

 
Donavon West said on August 13, 2008 9:54 AM ...

The gadget updates every 15 minutes with the same data as NBC and I would hope that they have it right! :)

As for the sorting, there are two schools of thought here. One is by "ranking" which is some algorythm (that is unknown to me) of weighting gold, silver and bronze at different levels.

The method that this gadget uses (and the one used by NBC, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated and many others) uses the total medal count.

Again, the gadget is accurate but maybe the sort order is not to your liking.

 
Tim said on August 13, 2008 6:53 PM ...

Just for curiousities sake, where does the data come from.? Are you scraping it from somewhere or is there a web service or database or something out there you connect to.?

 
Donavon West said on August 14, 2008 12:47 PM ...

I've updated the gadget to sort by either "total medals" or by "gold/silver/bronze". read more...

 
Sander Goudswaard said on August 14, 2008 4:30 PM ...
This post has been removed by the author.  
paperisdelicious said on August 16, 2008 12:37 PM ...

No other country counts the "overall medal count", only the US - because if they counted the correct way, they'd be in third (as shown on every country + official olympics site).

The US is afraid to show that it is losing to China (which it is) - so it counts gold/silver/bronze as all the same. Sorry, but in my book 6 bronze medals do not outweigh 5 gold ones.

China has 27 golds while the US has 16 (as of this post).

 
Donavon West said on August 18, 2008 10:25 AM ...

@paperisdelicious -

I would argue that by counting total medals that the US is more accepting of "anything less than perfection" (especially China). It says on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and not "Give us your perfect and only your gold medal winners because as are afraid of China".

Sure we have gotten quite a bit off course over the past 7 years (i.e. the US is likely to torture you for saying that we're "afraid"), but president Obama is going to try and correct that.

 
Ian said on August 18, 2008 1:49 PM ...

Hey I like this gadget of yours quite a bit. I have one request though, if you have the time. Could you let us specify a country to pin on the list so that countries not in the top 5 can still be tracked?

My country, Canada (which finally has some medals! Yay!) is far far from the top 5, but I'd still like to see its medal counts.

Anyhow, nice work man, keep it up.

 
Donavon West said on August 18, 2008 4:47 PM ...

@Ian - Thanks! I had thought about making a country "pinnable" in the #5 position (regardless of actual position), but I wanted to make the gadget available in a timely manner. Adding features like this would have delayed getting it into "production". After all, the Olympics have a finite period (17 days) and it's not like I'm getting paid to write the gadget. :)

Maybe if I write one for Vancouver in 2010 or London 2012?

I'm not promising anything, but I may change my mind if I can find the time so check back in a few days.

 
sagars said on August 19, 2008 2:54 AM ...

thanks for the fantastic widget its working pretty well on my Vista Desktop, BTw i have also written a post about your widget on my blog with ur backlink
check it out :-
"http://thehightechdaily.info/home/2008/08/19/olympic-medal-widget-for-vista-mac/

please reply if we can do a link exchange :D

 
morejamesmore said on August 20, 2008 8:32 AM ...

Hi Donavon,

Thanks for a brilliant widget.

I found this widget on youcalc.com that shows total medals per country (total medals, gold, silver and bronze)

In addition, the widget can show medals, per million inhabitants in a given country.
Check this out :)
http://www.youcalc.com/pubapps/1219221778285/?cswid=48abc6bc903b61d0

This will give you a quite different perspective :)

Keep up the good work!

James

 

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