In August, the Beijing Olympics were in full swing, but it seems people were more interested in what was going on outside their front doors. Despite the Olympic coverage on cbc.ca, it was theweathernetwork.com that garnered the most hits for an information site that month, according to Comscore Media Metrix, with 5.45 million unique visitors – 700,000 more than cbc.ca.

‘It’s a pretty consistent picture with us,’ Kyle Whatley, director of interactive services at The Weather Network, tells MiC. Rounding out the top five were canada.com with 3.98 million, ctv.ca with 3.88 million and canoe.ca with 3.61 million.

The Weather Network site provides forecasts for over 5,100 cities in Canada, the U.S. and around the world, as well as WeatherDirect, which emails free daily forecasts to subscribers.

Over the next few months the site will get a new look and a dynamic mapping solution that will use virtual art to better represent weather and traffic data. There are also plans to include more user-submitted videos and photos. ‘Our next move is to provide a more robust system of doing it closer to real time, so we can get pictures of what’s happening and give it a local emphasis,’ Whatley tells MiC. They’re also in the process of researching better ways to integrate advertising into video, mapping and Web 2.0 technologies.

The Weather Network’s French site météomédia.com also did well in August. It came in 9th, beating radio-canada.com by 600,000 unique visitors.