Le Mans 2008 Blog
A Fantastic Le Mans - thank you for joining me here at Baekdal.com
This year's Le Mans has been absolutely spectacular, with drama to the very end. And, it was the biggest "coverage" I have ever done. With 20+ articles, 3 Live trackers, 31,487 visitors (absolutely unique), and more than 110,000 page views in just 24 hours. This was a truly magnificent experience, which are all thanks to you who visited this site. So a BIG thanks here from Baekdal.com.
I don't (yet) know how many people that downloaded the Live Trackers, but I imagine it is quite a few. I was a bit disappointed by the performance and quality of the Le Mans web team. It was bad last year, with a ton of problems and links that didn't work - but they actually managed to do an even worse job this year.
It is of course a big event, and a few problems are to be expected. But many of the problems were rather inexcusable. It was problems due to not checking the links and/or adding the wrong ones. Not being ready when the race started. Not adding the right data to the page etc. All errors that shouldn't happen.
A.C.O. really needs to embrace the internet with a higher sense of quality. Their platform uses code concept that the rest of us abandoned in 1999. My advice to ACO: please make a completely new site, with a new and better backend. You got a great thing going, but the next Le Mans is in 2009 - not 1999...
EuroSport, however, did a great job covering the event. I was actually watching it online via EuroSports web player (hooked up to my TV). The picture quality, especially on the EuroSport 2 stream, was nearly as good as regular TV, and there were only 2-3 times when the signal dropped. This is quite an achievement considering that they was streaming to all of Europe, not many companies can manage to do that well.
There was only one minor annoyance. EuroSport would stop streaming Le Mans every two hours and ask "Do you want to continue watching LIVE". Well... yes! I actually planned to watch all 24 hours of it! :)
Sleep
I am now heading for bed. I did get 2 hours sleep between 09:30 and 11:30. I was simply so exhausted that I had to get some sleep. I thought I better do it then, so I could be "on and ready" for the big and exciting finish.
But two hours is not nearly enough, so I am heading for bed, and I am probably going to dream about racing...
Thank you all for coming to Baekdal.com. It was great fun for me, and I hope it was the same for you.
Baekdal.com will now go back to writing about my regular topics about design, user experience and making great products. But I will be back next year with even more Le Mans! I hope to see you too!
Gautch - Jun. 20, 2008
Thank you , thank you, thank you! This coverage has been awesome!!
Can't wait for next year!!
-Gautch