Today marks the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. This will be Canada’s second Winter Olympics (Calgary hosted in 1988). David Atkins, the director of the opening and closing ceremonies at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, is the mastermind behind the ceremonies in Vancouver this year.

Although the details of the event are a closely guarded secret, here are a five factoids about this year’s opening ceremonies:

Five Factoids about tonight’s Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver

1. No expense spared.

   Canada spent $40 million for the February 12 opening ceremonies, making it the most expensive opening ceremonies in Winter Olympics history.

2. Indoors?!

   The 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies will be the first ever to be held indoors. It’s a good thing, because rain is often in Vancouver’s forecast!

3. Greece takes the lead.

   Because it is the birthplace of the Olympic Games, Greece always leads the march of the athletes. After the Greek team, the countries will follow alphabetical order from Albania to Uzbekistan, with the host team, Canada, appearing last.

4. Go, Clara, go…

   The flag bearer for the Canadian team is Clara Hughes, a cyclist and speed skater and the first athlete to win multiple Olympic medals in both the Summer and Winter games. She won the gold medal in the 2006 Winter Olympics for the women’s 5000 meter speed skating by 1.01 seconds!

5. Doves on fire!

   One of the traditions of every Olympic opening ceremony is the release of doves, which symbolize peace. Originally the doves were released before the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. But in the 1988 Seoul Summer Games several doves perched on the cauldron and went up in flames, forcing the International Olympic Committee to change the traditional order. Yikes!

The opening ceremonies are guaranteed to be a spectacle. Tune into NBC at 7:30 p.m. EST or check your local TV listings to catch the Olympic spirit and cheer your country on!

ReferenceAnswers, the resident trivia wiz over at Answers.com, got a new look this week. Not to worry, it’s still the home of Today’s Highlights, where you’ll find newly updated trivia about today, every day.

So get going - find out today’s Answer of the Day, and what it has to do with… Patrick Dempsey!?

Haven’t had enough of the holidays yet?

January 4th is National Trivia Day! The origins of the day are unknown, however, many would claim it is a marketing ploy of the makers of Trivial Pursuit. There is a tradition to play the famous game, or other knowledge-based games, in honor of today.

Of course, there is also a tradition to call or email friends and family and share a little-known fact… What if I propose sharing that little-known trivia fact on WikiAnswers, spreading your knowledge to an entire Q&A community spanning the globe?

Go for it! Find an unanswered question that can be answered with a piece of trivia, or create your own question and answer it. Comment on this blog post with the URL of your question and answer so we can all learn something trivial - but interesting! - today.

…Or, if you’re looking for trivia instead of sharing it, check out the Spotlight on today’s Answers.com homepage.

Let’s talk about Today’s Highlights.

It’s a daily updated feature from Answers.com that offers a spotlight, featured question, today’s birthdays, today in history and more, right from the homepage. You could say it’s like taking your daily dose of Vitamin T: ‘t’ for trivia and ‘vitamin’ because it’s good for you.

You could also take the trivia you learn and finally have something to contribute to the water cooler conversations going on right outside your cubicle. Don’t be shy; just lean over there and sing ‘happy birthday’ to Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker and Aretha Franklin or mention that today, in 1328, Robert the Bruce became king of the not-yet-independent Scotland.

Now let’s talk specifically about today’s highlight.

First of all, I wrote the Spotlight, so I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t fall madly in love with it right when you start reading.

Secondly, it covers the topic of wikis, which we discuss here a lot (being WikiAnswers gurus and all). I’ll be honest, when I first toyed around with the whole wiki thing, I was confused and a little skeptical; after all, why should I write something if it can be edited by anyone later on?

But once I got into it, it made a lot of sense. I know a little bit about a topic, Timmy knows a little something more, Samantha adds some personal experience… Collaboration is for the greater good, and like the Spider-man movies have taught me, the greater good is worth fighting for.

Thank you Answers.com Editorial Team, for serving fresh Today’s Highlights every single day; thank you Ward Cunningham, for developing wiki technology; thank you WikiAnswers, for having the courage to fight the good fight.

Yours truly was interviewed for an article in Globes, a fancy-shmancy Israeli business finance newspaper. The article covered Facebook applications, and as you know, we’ve released quite a few in the past few months.

Unfortunately for most of us out there, it’s in Hebrew… But the gist is about why and how we made Facebook applications based on Answers.com trivia and WikiAnswers Q&A. I’ve included some of my answers to the reporter’s questions in English below (not necessarily appearing like this in the article):

I work for Answers Corp, a U.S. and Israel-based company leading the world of online answers with Answers.com, a site with over 4 million reference topics, and WikiAnswers, the leading community-driven Q&A wiki. Both sites have content that I thought was worth sharing – we all need answers, right?

We wanted to create a way to allow Facebook users to put Answers.com trivia and WikiAnswers Q&A on their profiles, allowing friends to ask and answer questions or learn new facts, updated daily. That’s where Dapper comes in. Dapper, an exciting new Web 2.0 company, makes it easy to extract content from any site and reuse it elsewhere. They recently developed a way to create Facebook apps from any website content (in beta), which is how we’ve been creating these apps. We’re working closely with them as early adopters of their technology.

I chose topics for the apps that I thought would appeal to different people with diverse interests; for instance, there’s a Music Q&A app, perfect for people who are into music trivia, a Sports Q&A app for sports enthusiasts, and so forth. What you get is an app in your profile listing unanswered trivia questions, which anyone who can view your profile is invited to click and answer on WikiAnswers.

It’s also great for students, who were Facebook’s original audience. They can add Q&A apps relating to their studies (law, health, money) and test their knowledge, help others learn or even ask questions of their own.

Aside from Q&A apps, there are also a bunch of trivia apps as well: Quote of the Day, Wine Word of the Day, Today’s Birthdays (see below for URLs). There is also another app – the first we did - developed by Dapper that includes Word of the Day and Today in History (here).