London 2012 Olympics Logo launched in a blaze of moblogging... and no-one can read it

Here it is. A year in the making, with widespread consultations and planning putting the cost at around £400K... and it's illegible.

As blogs everywhere are beating news websites and print media to the punch, these pics from the dedicated moblog were possibly the first to be published. There's no denying it - the stylised "2012" Tiswas disaster is virtually unreadable, and tells us some pretty scary things about the focus group's attitude to technology.

Here's Lord Seb's wonderfully nonsensical justification for it:

"It meets the biggest challenge we have over the next five years, which is reaching out to young people.

"It is interactive and absolutely at the heart of what we need to do - engaging the attention of young people through new media and the virtual world they can get transported into.

"It will be imperative that it is flexible. I think it is way beyond any simple logo.

"It reaches out to young people in new and creative ways and uses the language that they understand and all the technology that is familiar to us.

"It is different, exciting and it really defines us as a city, a country and an organisation."

So leaving aside how interactive a logo can actually BE (you look at it and you want to hurl?), the message is loud and clear. The yoot were asked and the yoot spoke.... but I'm pretty sure they were having us on. Unless this was decided in partnership with Barbie Girls, I'm at a loss as to which self-respecting child / teenager / hoodie would have given their blessing to this disaster.

It's nice to know that Lord Coe and the Olympics team are paying heed to the huge impact technology can have in children's lives, the "new media" and "virtual world", but the answer to engaging with kids on that level can't possibly be to construct an international Olympics logo along the lines of a home-made MySpace page banner. This logo speaks to the world about what our vision of technology is; apparently it's hackneyed 80s lightning bolts. Beijing, heart of the world's fastest growing market for virtually everything, plumped for Lenovo and the delicate, lacquered Olympic torch and matching laptops. London? They took the Olympics back two decades.

Like many others, I always suspected focus groups inevitably fail to serve the people they are designed to please. This hideous splash of Pepto Bismol has served to prove only two things; the UK needs to stop viewing technology as a silver-foil coated vision of the future from 1954, and moblogging is probably the way forward.