It will be great to see the world's best sailors compete together on home waters (and hopefully see blighty win a few more golds) and then blog about it afterwards - or so I thought.
Apparently the following warning is being printed on all Olympic tickets:
"Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet more generally."
Wow - that's really restrictive and backwards looking.
London is a tech centre, home of start-ups & media friendly, and the mobile operators are already boasting how much 3G coverage the Olympic site will have (and reminding everyone that Beijing only had 2G) explicitly to support Facebook and blog updates.
There have already been signs of back pedalling with Olympic organisers admitting that:
"The internet has changed the world and we’re not going to be silly. But the reality is that we live in an Internet world where Facebook downloads and uploads are happening every day of the week and there’s not much we can do about it."
Anyhow I'm going to go ahead on the grounds that reading the restrictions with a fine tooth comb the issue is mostly with sound and video while for photography it simply mustn't be commercial.
As you might have noticed this blog is advert and hence revenue free so there'll be no commercial gain, but it does seem a bit ridiculous.
This is meant to be the big world-coming-together-unifying event but we're not meant to communicate about it.
That's just crazy.
