The Vancouver 2010 Olympics were the first games that took place "in the cloud." While it would be too easy to say that they were "The Social Media Olympics", that does not describe the breadth and comprehensiveness by which technology dramatically changed the way everyone interacted with the games.

Social media is for many people already old news, and what's novel about these Olympics, what made it possible, was the pervasiveness of cloud computing, the concept that frees us from our personal computer, frees us from a single television channel, to be able to interact with the games anywhere, anytime, and anyway we choose.

There's really no division between official broadcaster and even official sponsors, the olympics are so transcendent they permeate our society for two weeks, kind of like a cloud.

One of the impacts of the rise of cloud computing is the dominance of real-time media. The way in which compelling moments flash through the cloud like lightning with echoes that roar like Thunder.

Sidney Crosby's gold medal winning goal was a great example of this. The moment the puck when into the net an electric current surged across the country (across the world) firing human bodies up with emotion. The thundering echo produced by this strike could be heard by those not directly connected.

Live holds a power that is now irrefutable. The many narratives within the Olympics are impossible to control, and impossible to contain. NBC for example has faced significant criticism for continuing to use tape-delay, and it's no co-incidence that they lost a lot of money. Twitter on the other hand was not an official "broadcaster" or rights-holder and yet they were arguably one of the most significant media outlets of these Olympics. Other cloud computing players like Facebook and Google also played significant roles in the coverage of the games, part of this emerging genre of real-time media.

The hockey games have been a great example of this. If you were for whatever reason unable to tune in, there was no way you could escape the games. Recording it on your PVR to watch later may still be fun, but you'd know the result cause there's so many ways the game is being amplified to every nook and corner of the country.

The downside of course is that it means less popular, less sensational events, have greater difficulty standing out because the "live" narrative is so strong that the competition for attention for lesser known sports and athletes can be even more difficult, even if they can be viewed via the web. Unless of course they have something sensational happen at the right time, such as catastrophe or great victory, at which point they can pierce through the immediacy of real-time coverage.

However when it comes to the athletes it is fascinating to watch the subtle and sometimes not so subtle transition from amateur sports to professional. While the Olympics are no longer about the amateur, it still has a bit of that culture. Yet there's also a strong narrative about how the victorious athletes will be able to cash in, and that plays a major role in their use of social media.

Sure there are some athletes who are relatively unknown and are using twitter/facebook to chat with their friends and family, yet there are many more athletes that see social media as a means of helping to cultivate and grow their personal brands, in hopes of cashing in afterwards.

Think of it like an audition to be a spokesperson or celebrity. The stage is so public, the audience so accessible, that there's almost an intrinsic instinct to use the tools to gain fans and popularity.

Of course advertisers and brands engage in similar efforts, competing with each other for our limited attention span, using social media to also try and gain fans and popularity. This is where the crass commercialism, given the cloud effect, also becomes so pervasive as to make it impossible to avoid. No longer satisfied with traditional advertising, brands know they need to be even more aggressive, even more saturated, in order to capture our short and fleeting attention.

Technology has also made it difficult for VANOC and the broadcasting consortium to control the narrative and monopolize coverage so as to maximize their investment. While they will make money as the games are hosted by Canada, other broadcasters, like NBC, will not be so lucky, and generally they will blame technology.

Looking forward therefore at the next Olympics in 2012, but also at what the broadcasting and media industry can learn from these games, we can extract three key observations:

The continued dominance of "live" and the potential amplification of the moment. The ability to strike lightning and create thunder is something everyone in the communications industry will study and attempt to replicate.

The rise of cloud computing as more than just a technical concept, but also the means by which we experience culture and live events.

The continued acceleration of technology and society: two years from now the next Olympics, probably broadcast in 3D, will be so radically different from this one that it'll feel more like 4 years have passed rather than just 2.

Will the broadcasters who have already paid for the rights to the 2012 games look to the emerging real-time media industry for money to help subsidize the cost? Will Google, Twitter, Facebook, and the like be fully entrenched as the established media by then? What about location based media? So many questions, so little time, and yet so many variables as to how it might play out.