Internet blog

Hi I'm Andy Pipes, and I lead the product development for the Sport Olympics website. Today we're launching "Olympic favourites", a way to personalise your experience of the Olympic Games. With one click you can keep up to date with the latest news and stats from any athlete, country or olympic sports you're interested in. This blog post describes how it works.

The BBC Sport website will tell the story of this year's Olympic Games with over 10,000 pages of content about the events, countries and athletes taking part.

How do you keep on top of all the news, schedules and stats about the people and activities that interest you most when the occasion is in full swing?

We hope Favourites allows you to do just that.

When you're browsing the new Olympics web site, you will notice light grey "plus" symbols next to important names: athletes such as Rebecca Adlington, collections of events such as Table Tennis, specific events such as the Women's Pole Vault, and competing countries like Team GB.

These plus symbols are a way into a simple but smart bookmarking system.

Roll over the plus symbol, and you'll see the text "Add to Favourites" appear in green. Click on this text, and you're telling us that you'd like that person or thing to be added to your personal list of items to keep track of.

Press the button and you'll notice a pop-up message telling you that you have added the item to your favourites, and a prompt for you to open what we call the 'favourites tray'. Opening the tray reveals a grid of five boxes waiting to be filled with your favourite athletes, countries and events.

The Favourites Tray

The tray displays the latest headline for each of up to five favourites, as well as links to their pages on the site. The favourites tray follows you around the BBC Sport site, so that you can check in and see what's new for your favourites whilst you're reading a story, or watching a video.

If you've already added five items, and attempt to follow a sixth by pressing the Add to Favourites button, a menu will appear asking you which of your existing favourites you'd like to replace with the new one.

Your Favourites Page

The favourites tray also contains a link to a personalised page. Click on the link saying Favourites Page. Here, you'll receive more news from your favourites, links to share your favourites activity with your social network friends, and a special detail panel that updates throughout the Games.

Each type of item - be it person, place or activity - is displayed in your favourites page alongside the most relevant stats for that subject.

Athletes

Before the Olympics has started, if you've selected an athlete for your favourites, you'll see the start date of the first of their events listed in the detail panel, so you will know when they will get out of the blocks. Then, during the Games, the detail panel will list out all of your athletes' results, including medals.

Countries

If you support a national team, when you select them as a favourite, the detail panel will - up to the start of the Games - display the medal totals for that team in Beijing 2008 as well as surface their top medal sport four years ago. During the Games, the medal counts are replaced by live medal tallies, and top medal sports for London 2012.

Collection of events (e.g. Swimming)

Before the Games, your detail panel will show you a few facts: when that sport starts in July or August, and which country took its top honours in the Beijing Games. During the London Games, this detail panel transforms into a mini-schedule for that sport, displaying its 3 upcoming events. And after all the events in that sport are complete, the detail panel will show which country or countries performed best this year.

Specific event (e.g. Women's 3m Springboard)

Before the event kicks off, the detail panel shows two items - a countdown clock to the first day of the event, and the athlete or team who won the event in Beijing four years ago.

Then, as the event gets into full swing, the detail panel will tell you exactly which rounds or matches of the event are coming up next. Then, when all the action is over in that event, the favourites page will display the medalists alongside the latest news for the event.

I hope that you explore this new feature in the run-up to the Games, and use it as an integral piece of your Olympics experience on the BBC Sport website.

Please let me know in the comments your thoughts on the service, and how we might improve it in future releases.

Andrew Pipes is Senior Product Manager, Sport & Olympics 2012, BBC Future Media