New Media of Olympic Proportions

July 14, 2008 | Posted by: Jayson Schkloven

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will be the first Olympics to take place during a time when online video and social media tools have really hit critical mass in the mainstream. In fact, NBC is planning to use the 08 Olympics as a "billion-dollar new media research test bed."

Not only is NBC planning to simulcast 2200 hours of event coverage online, but the athletes themselves are jumping into the new media wave with traditional and video blogs, Twitter feeds and perhaps even some live Qik videos from Beijing.

This will add an entirely new dimension to the events and allow viewers to engage in real-time, global discussions as the competitions are taking place. Can you imagine reading daily blog posts from Michael Phelps as he prepares to go for gold or how about track-side Tweets from Tyson Gay?

My only question is, will the Chinese government be restricting the flow of certain types of content coming out of the Olympics or will they keep the lines of communication open?

Regardless, here are a few links to some interesting Olympic new media sites. Please feel free to leave a comment with more!

Check out this site to see (and download) the embeddable widgets that NBC has created for the Olympics. They offer a USA Medal Counter widget, a real-time event photo slide show widget and an Olympic headline feed widget. You can also check out NBCOlympics.com for live video feeds, athlete blogs and much more; all social media ready.

Take a look at this blog from Diana Lopez. She and three of her brothers are on the U.S. Olympic Taekwondo team. Could be fun to watch this family blog unfold throughout the games.

This is very interesting example of how corporate America is tying into the Olympic new media movement. Mutual of Omaha insurance has sponsored a YouTube channel to track the progress of the Olympic Swim Team with videos on YouTube. The channel only has a handful of subscribers at this point but that should grow as the Olympics get underway.

Last one; take a look at Tyson Gay’s Twitter page (sponsored by alltel Wireless of course). Hopefully, we’ll get some instant updates from trackside.