China and the United States competed for the top medal contender, and now they're competing for which country's residents visited the official Beijing2008.cn website more. Between Aug. 8 and Aug. 17, 2008, the website attracted 16.5 million visitors, with China taking the lead at 4.3 million visitors, the United States coming in second with 4.1 million visitors, and Canada coming in third with 937,000. Overall, China accounted for 25.7 percent of visitors who went to the site.
One interesting point to note is the fact that the main site is in Mandarin, and I'm assuming the 95 percent of people who have Internet ADD (like me) probably didn't notice the English, French, Spanish, and Arabic language options at the top right of the page. Did you guys check it out, or did you go elsewhere for Olympics news?
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Technically, the main site is in Chinese. Mandarin refers to the official dialect of the spoken Chinese language, but there are many regional dialects as well as local dialects. However, the written Chinese language is the same across the country regardless of dialect. So you can write or generally speak Chinese, but if you say you speak Chinese you might be prompted "Which dialect?"
If I remember my history right, the first emperor of China used the Chinese written language to unite all of China so that even though people from different regions might not understand what the other is saying, they'll always be able to communicate through the written word.
And yeah, I checked out the official site to view all the amazing venues! But it was nbcolympics.com for pretty much everything else. So many hours of coverage to go through!