The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics began with a many bangs, courtesy of the thousands of drummers in the opening ceremony. Once competition began, a tally of medals won seemed like an obvious data set for Swivel. Since no-one else had embarked on this task, I decided to take it on myself. I included the result in a blog post about Swivel

At first I was typing in the data, but scanning the medal table on the Official Olympics site quickly became a challenge. It was time for an automated solution, so I whipped up a little perl script to scrape the data and I now update the data fairly regularly (not quite real time though).

I am pleased to say that this chart has been something of a runaway success in terms of visitors: at last count views had passed 9500 in two weeks. I attribute this, in part, to Olympics fever but I am sure that it has also been helped by being featured on the popular "Random Thoughts" blog.

There is also an overal medal tally chart based on the same data.

I have now also written about medal counts adjusted for population or gross domestic product (GDP).