It’s opening ceremony day for the 2012 Olympics in London and Olympics projects from around the world are popping up as a way to track the events and records. Here’s a sampling.

1. The Guardian: Was an Olympic record set today?

This painfully simple — but absolutely brilliant — app from The Guardian tells you whether an Olympic record was set today. You get a big “YES” or “NO” and you can scroll through past days to see whether one was set and the results for it. Simple. But useful. And a lot of fun. I also love the typography and the fact that it’s a standalone app with its own, easy-to-remember URL: wasanolympicrecordsettoday.com Read more

The Knight Digital Media Center at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, acknowledging that people are hungry for data, has launched a simple tool that makes it easy to turn data into searchable databases. The tool, freeDive, uses the Google Visualization API to pull data from a Google Spreadsheet and generate an embeddable widget that you can drop onto any page — no coding required. You can see an example here.

The video below shows you the end result of a database that includes name, city and donation amount for 25,000 campaign contributors (meaning the tool scales well for large amounts of data).

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There’s no dearth of ways for journalists to congratulate and recognize themselves with awards. Whether you’re a small local newspaper or the most-watched national news show, there exists a seemingly endless list of contests and prizes to celebrate everything from the best public service journalism (Pulitzer anyone?) down to the most-specific specialized reporting (Media Orthopaedic Reporting Excellence Awards?). But within that sphere of contest categories, there’s not really been a contest solely focused on data journalism.

Now there is: The Data Journalism Awards, which purports to be “the first international contest recognizing outstanding work in the field of data journalism worldwide.”

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Journalists, what are some of your New Year’s resolutions? If one of them happens to be “learn to code”, then search engine titan Google has you covered with Google Code University.

There are many reasons that journalists should learn how to code. Like we’ve stated before here on 10,000 Words, coding skills are an essential part of working in a new media environment. A knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript gives you the tools you need to create your own website, and can make you a valuable resource for any news organization. Not only that, several journalism fellowships and trainee programs are looking for journalists with programming knowledge. You can have the skills to apply for an opportunity to receive funding for your own cutting edge journalism projects.

Google Code University (GCU) does not require any registration, and materials are free to use. In Web Programming, for example, there are lectures, videos, and contributed course content to teach users how to create interactive web applications that go beyond your basic static web page.

Here are just a few of the courses GCU offers:

• Python
• C++
• Java
• CSS, HTML and JavaScript
• HTML5
• Web Security
• Algorithms
• Android Application Development
• Introduction to Databases and MySQL

Computer science educators are also welcome to submit their own coursework for inclusion within GCU. All courses will be placed under a Creative Commons license which will allow for people to reuse and modify the courses for their own curriculum as necessary. And if you’re looking for more curriculum to peruse or get stuck on a particular term, GCU also includes a search feature via Google Directory that includes lectures, assignments, papers and videos from schools like Harvard University, Duke University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

GCU is a part of Google Code’s education resources, which also include Google DocType and the popular HTML5 Rocks website. To get started today, visit http://code.google.com/edu.