The thrill is gone.

Having the Winter Olympics just one time zone away has stripped the rush out of the online action. When NBC decided to go Memorex instead of live during the Summer Games in Sydney a scant 18 months ago, getting the results in real-time as events took place on the other side of the world became a shadow sport.

Logging on in the morning brought a flurry of NYTimes.com Olympic alerts, filling me in on the athletic feats completed while I was asleep. Sometimes, a late-night check just before bedtime brought welcome news. No such compulsion this time around. It's not that the games are any more or any less exciting but that sense of urgency is gone, aided and abetted by NBC's treatment of the entire event as a miniseries.

So far, I haven't felt the compulsion to sign up for anyone's Olympic alerts this year, although that might not be the case if I didn't have constant online access and the crawl running across the usually muted TV on my desk as I juggle cable news channels.

I'm not against the concept. I do get ESPN's Insider alerts for a hockey team I follow rather closely. Unfortunately, it can't be set to send only winning results but the phone faithfully vibrates after every period with a scoring update. But it's a lot harder to avoid the results of most Olympic events than it is to find them.

Medal counts, antithetical in so many ways to the Olympics, are everywhere. Headlines are slapped on front pages as soon as something the powers that be consider significant happens; for the U.S. sites that's usually anything involving fellow citizens. Site after site has special sections or micro-sites. I'm beginning to believe that anyone wanting to remain oblivious until prime time will have to mount a near-total media blackout. Even official Olympics sites show the results on the first screen instead of offering a thoughtful 'click here' for results. Woe to the viewer who wants to be surprised but makes the mistake of checking in for the TV schedule and gets a dose of pre-prime time reality.

The official sites are also incredibly confusing. Designed by MSNBC and hosted by Microsoft, Olympics.com and NBCOlympics.com are almost like identical twins with very subtle distinctions, which makes it difficult to know exactly where you are. The two are also hosted by Microsoft, which might explain why I ran into so many technical glitches using Netscape 4.78. Toss in the IOC's site and just getting to the right site is bewildering.

Fans adept at multitasking can watch some events and judge them online at Olympics.com as they are being judged at the venue. The 'You Be the Judge' feature includes elegant Flash graphics of various elements like the triple throw twist in pairs figure skating.

Certain that there would be a live poll about the controversial pairs figure skating results Monday night I checked Olympics.com right after the event. Sure enough about 3,000 people had already voted between the Russian gold medal winners and the Canadian runners-up. The Online Harris Poll was running 95% to 5% in favor of the latter, a ratio that barely budged even as the number of votes kept climbing doubling to about 134,000 within hours Tuesday afternoon as MSNBC replayed the routines. By late afternoon it was 96% to 4% with 162,000-plus votes cast. The results are about as meaningful as standing ovations at the rink, that is to say good for some egos but otherwise useless.

Spinning the globe even a twist or two helps keep some perspective. For instance, over the weekend while the U.S. sites were writing about the great security measures at the Olympics, the BBC online was talking to a Russian skier irked by a security guard who sniffed her water bottle. The BBC lost a few points, though, with sometimes hard-to-find front-page links and a story about Web sites sans links, which meant I had to google for Sven Hannawald's favorite cake recipe. (It involves hazelnut and marzipan.)

The hometown Deseret News paired up with KSL-TV for WinterSports2002.com to produce a lively, well-designed site. It's not perfect: the big headline format that puts only a few stories at the top of the page could use some work, as could the small, dark photos apparently meant to look like TV screens. The Salt Lake Tribune's Olympics site doesn't use its front-page real estate wisely and isn't very sophisticated. It's still worth a visit because of its extensive coverage and resources but it would be a great exercise to hand it off to some Web design classes for a makeover.

Any media outlet can use the Web for material that doesn't fit in a broadcast or a publication, but the Internet offers some the chance to publish on otherwise off-days. For a site like USAToday.com, the online extension of a paper that goes dark on weekends and holidays, that's especially important when the event begins on a Friday.

I have to admit I was a little surprised when USAToday.com won the 2001 EPpy last week for the 'Best Design of a Newspaper Online Service,' as well as the best business section. I'm not one of those USA Today snobs -- I subscribe and have done some hockey stringing for the sports section. I even had a tryout in the business section the week of the World Series earthquake. I've just never been a major fan of the Web site, which struck me as cluttered in various incarnations and difficult to navigate whenever I was seeking something specific.

Nudged by the Olympics and the EPpy, I've been spending some quality time with the online version of TNN (The Nation's Newspaper) as I learned to call it during that long-ago week as an honorary insider. The photo-motion feature, which shows several stills of a sequence in rapid succession, was slick, but the accompanying sound of a shutter as each picture clicked by drove to me to put my sound back on mute. I have yet to be swayed about the overall site, but if you're only going to bookmark a few sites for the Olympics USAToday.com could easily be one of them, particularly if you are already a frequent reader of the sports section.

(Time out for a personal theory: anyone who isn't into American pop culture but needs to know what's going on can keep up just by reading USA Today's Life section two-three times a week. I firmly believe editors who were caught off guard by Kurt Cobain's status among the younger generation could have avoided some major mistakes this way. I hear Frank Bruni's new book suggests President Bush is pop-culture challenged. Here's an easy solution.)

CNNSI.com would be another good bookmark. Stuffed with content from a news organization producing a daily magazine in Salt Lake City, the constantly fresh site also serves as an umbrella for coverage from other AOL Time Warner resources. ESPN.com has some fun connecting the new events at the Winter Games to its own X Games. As much as I like and use this site, it's hard to get past the clutter that comes with the recent partnership with MSN.

Then there's the ghost of Olympics' past. Some of the highest quality content I've ever seen online came from Quokka, an innovative firm that 'got' how to use the Web to provide immersive experiences, particularly with sports. It's on the list of failures I can't forgive -- a company that should have made it and instead was flushed away. The URL doesn't even go anywhere now; it just pings into oblivion.