The Wimbledon Broadcast Centre’s ‘roof garden’ is where some of the interviews and crowd shots you’ll have seen on TV are filmed from. For your enjoyment and delight here are three minutes of exploration, including glimpses of Todd Martin, Luke Jensen, John Inverdale, Tracy Austin, Pat Cash and some dudes from Fox (if you know who they are, go ahead and tag the video).

Without the roof, Centre Court had a completely different feel from last year. Very much more like an amphitheatre.

Hawkeye judgements were used to judge disputed line calls on the bigger courts, and best of all the results were shown on big screens for the crowds to see. And they loved it. Listen for the rising “Oooooooh…” noise.

Incidently, I really like Viddler. I like the fact that it brings community tagging to videos; not just the video as a whole, but timestamps within the clip. Because of that, I think it’s a long way ahead of YouTube as being the Flickr-for-video.

But perhaps more interestingly, I spent a while wandering around the championships to share a few photos of what Wimbledon is like behind the scenes.

My previous experience of Wimbledon was helping out in the hospitality suite. The bunker (or ‘IBM areas’ as my ground pass describes it), embedded in the broadcasting centre, is a totally different experience. I didn’t see a single drop of Pimms this year, for example. :-)

The working day for the team is long. The team start arriving anywhere from 7:00am with even the late stragglers like me wandering in around 9:00, and didn’t even start to head home until the tennis finished over 12 hours later. In fact, much of the team didn’t start packing up for the night until 10:30 or 11:00pm, depending on the last job: delivering the following day’s schedule. The afternoon tends to include a few tours of the IBM setup, with clients and business partners being shown around everything from how the scores and match statistics make their way from the court to the commentator, the infrastructure of the wimbledon.org site and (increasingly, this year) what IBM is doing for Wimbledon in Second Life.

The setup in SL contains a virtual court, scoreboards, video wall, Wimbledon branded freebies (clothes, umbrellas, eyeballs, flying towel, …), and lots more. As with all the best things, it’s not finished. Early on the first day, Ian handed me a webcam and I used Veodia to set up a video stream from the real life bunker back into SL so people can see some of the buzz. Expect to see more demonstrations of the real world setup being added over the next few days too.

It has been steadily attracting good numbers of visitors from all over the world, and getting it mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the New Scientist blog and a few other places probably didn’t hurt at all. I couldn’t help thinking that it would be an interesting (but probably very short-lived) experiment to link to the event from the wimbledon.org homepage. That site gets a frankly incredible amount of traffic and it’s impressive to watch the hit counter whirring by; the last two or three digits are a blur, even at quiet moments. The important thing with the virtual facet of Wimbledon was to reach people though, even individually. In fact, especially individually. Meeting people (whether they were visiting execs in the real world, or SL visitors) and helping them understand what we were doing certainly made for an exciting couple of days.

Speaking to an audience which contained a fair few directors, and are more used to being addressed by past and present chief execs, could have been slightly intimidating; one of them once managed my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. They were a really friendly crowd though, and made me feel very welcome. Many of them had spent time in marketing, and the overwhelming message from them to me during dinner was that I should give it a go.

Tomorrow morning I’m heading (back) to Wimbledon to join Ian in bringing the behind-the-scenes story of IBM’s work there to life. We do some very cool things at Wimbledon, and it will be fun going back to the bunker. (Shh.. I’ve also been quietly crafting a Twitterbot for Wimbledon 2007 as well).

One year ago, when I attended Wimbledon to help out with the hospitality, I noted that “there were some excellent conversations, and quite a few people who really seemed to find the whole virtual worlds thing not just unusual, but interesting and potentially useful too”. So much has changed, and so little. A year ago, IBM’s use of virtual worlds boiled down to a few intrepid explorers attempting to show some value in Second Life. Now IBM has a large and popular presence in Second Life, is setting up a metaverse behind the firewall and exploring virtual worlds in all sorts of other places too. It’s been an interesting year.

Update: I shall post something soon, but for now, here are my Wimbledon 2007 photos.