If you take the current Olympic medals table (ranked by number of golds) and re-order the top 20 gold medal winners to those listed by number of people per gold medal, according to population figures, the rankings are somewhat different.

By this measure, the leader, Australia, is 7 times more athletic than the US and 30 times more than China. Greece is doing well with its home advantage at number 2.

Rank:

1. Australia
2. Greece
3. Romania
4. Sweden
5. Hungary
6. Belarus
7. Netherlands
8. Ukraine
9. France
10. Italy
11. South Korea
12. Japan
13. Great Britain
14. Germany
15. United States
16. Russia
17. Canada
18. Poland
19.Turkey
20. China

Let me repitch one simple thing that I believe would make the web more useful - ubiquitous use of one-line-bios. It's something I have been banging on about for years, and is now built into Typepad but hasn't taken off.

So here's the pitch (someone who is better at spreading memes, help me out if you feel like it):

Back in the days, lots of people were looking at online syndication, news syndication in particular, and they set up large groups to look at it (NewsML ICE etc.). - and RSS, which actually has nothing to do with syndication, blew them all away (as Jason Kottke has pointed out, RSS is basically a hypertext link and headline that points to something - there is no movement of content and hence no syndication) .

All you really need to create the same functionality as traditional syndication on the web is a clean descriptive headline and a link.

Amazingly, because it was not an easy task to get hold of a persistent link that points to a story (and not a transient page) and freely available headline text without scraping, RSS (and permalinks) emerged as an essential component of the web, honed by Darwinian simplicity.

It is clear that the news 'syndication' model extends to other things such as catalogue items and media files such as music playlists - but each of these has no problem in that headlines readily exist, from song titles to product names.

But for one of the most important types of information that people will link to - information about people: 'about me' pages, resumes, friends list etc., there is no common use of a headline.

It is common enough to just link from a person's name, but a name is not unique or descriptive enough to entice you to click through.

Imagine if all news stories were linked to by the name of the publication, without any headlines.

Creating a resume is hard, it takes time - but a one line summary is easier and useful. So the plea is this:

Create a one line description of yourself, a one-line-bio for others to use in conjunction with your name. I.E in all the places from blogrolls to links to about me pages on weblogs or social networks or FOAF files or resume postings. Anywhere where you would normally use your name as a link, use name: one-line-bio.

Personal headlines. I believe that's what is needed for a 'people' version of RSS to take off.

Here's an example (mine is in my side bar):

Timzilla.net

One line bio: British, based in York UK, technical director at infosential , runner, geek

Chatango have just launched Chatango mini, a fully embeddable IM client that sits directly in the browser and has configurable size and look and feel. Click on 'get your own Chatango' in my version in the right hand side bar.

During the cold war, the stand off between the US and USSR channeled energy into substitutes for warfare that were actually interesting and benign. Superpowers flexed their muscles figuratively in the space race and literally at the Olympics.

But there is something tawdry about the Olympics these days, it feels anachronistic without having the benefit of being camp, in the way that, say, the Eurovision Song Contest is.

The Olympics are a colossal, committee driven, waste of money, vast sums being spent on facilities that flatter politicians’ egos but would be better spent elsewhere. For a poor country are super expensive Olympic facilities, that are usually underused after the event itself, that much different from a hugely opulent, dictator’s palace?

In today's political climate, instead of muscle flexing on the track and field, sadly we have $1bn plus security spend against potential terrorist threats.

For the events themselves, the sophistication of doping and the emergent prospect of gene therapy reduce the value of an Olympic medal, and provide a spectator experience as unsatisfying as visiting a museum half full of fakes. These days, perhaps a cyborg Olympics would actually have more integrity and it would certainly be more interesting to see just how fast a state-of-the-art, scientifically enhanced human being could run.

Lastly, for all the purist ideals of the Olympics - amateur competitors competing for the honor and privilege, this purism doesn’t extend to the organizers who are so eager to leech so much money off sponsors that spectators can't take a brand of soda that isn't paying a sponsorship fee into a stadium. In the sports, like soccer, where there are major professional international competitions, the Olympics' version of the event is largely inferior.

So perhaps the Olympics have jumped the shark, and if so then it would be perfectly fitting if they disappeared into obscurity from whence they came - in Greece.

Google's attempt at an auction could break a piece of the cronyism that has plagued corporate America and has caused huge failures from the demise of Enron to the collapse of the technology bubble. Middle men creaming large fees for little value-add and dolling them out to friends is not a good thing regardless of whether you are a free market evangelist or not. This is why I am so surprised that people like Dan Gillmor are choosing to attack Google's offering. Google's offer price is an attempt to derive price from real demand, not what generates profits for middle men. This benefits small investors in the long term.

Why aren't Google's PR team on the offensive over this!

"If Google's offering works...then this IPO would legitimize an alternative to the traditional IPO that will diminish the power of Wall Street investment banks. Other companies, companies with lower profiles than Google, will have a new alternative for raising money. Wall Street doesn't even like to think about that possibility."

"If, on the other hand, Google's IPO fails -- if not enough investors bid, or if the price is too low, or if the IPO sinks, leaving hordes of angry individual investors and the company with egg on its face -- then the auction model will go back on the shelf and Wall Street investment banking will go back to business as usual."

MSN Money - Jubak's Journal

Digital Deliverance: From More Than 7,000 Sources, Just a Dozen Account for Most Google News Stories?