Blogging Olympians offer a whole new view of the games.

Unfortunately for me, the 2008 Summer Games are firing up just as my workload has gotten pretty intense. That means I'm already far behind on medal winners, upsets and "you should have seen it" moments.

So I've had to squeeze my Olympic coverage out of friends and occasional news browsing, which tends to be 99% Michael Phelps-related.

Giving up on actually keeping track of the games, I decided instead to focus my limited time on finding and following Olympians who are blogging about their experiences.

That's how I found out about the "Voices of the Olympic Games" project by electronics manufacturer Lenovo. One hundred athletes were given a Lenovo computer and Flip camera in hopes they would blog about the games.

While you probably won't find a lot of superstars on the roster, the final result is an impressive cross-section of Olympic life.

It's so vastly different from the slick, overly produced newscasts, you quickly start to find yourself enamored with relatively obscure athletes who are training and competing relentlessly without much hope of landing in the limelight.

Here's a telling excerpt from a blog post by American water polo team member Heather Petri, talking about their 12-11 win over China:

Our fans were battling with the multitude of Chinese people to see who could be louder. Our media director Greg, informed us today that it was the highest scoring game in Olympic history. That's right! Setting records and dazzling fans all in one!

Not everyone was so happy about it. The first thing my mom said when I saw her after the game was "Please don't do that again. I still feel a little nauseous from being so nervous." I just smiled. Oh, Mom. It's OK. Really.

Normally, a corporate blogging site like Lenovo's might seem pointless when there are so many other places to find independent bloggers. And in fact, many of the posts featured by Lenovo are actually re-posted from the athletes' own sites.

But Lenovo offers a two-part public service here by collecting all these disparate blogs in one place and also by helping make blogging possible at all.

For a variety of reasons, blogging from this year's Olympics is a challenging feat. While this is the first time the IOC has even allowed  Olympians to blog, there are still a wide range of obstacles.

As ArsTechnica.com reported recently:

Blogs from common hosts, such as Blogspot and WordPress, have been blocked off and on within China for some time now, so Olympic athletes looking to post about their experiences may not even be able to access their sites without some sort of contingency plan. That's not the only place they'll have to compromise, either—other taboo topics include the local police, government, as well as the likes of Falun Gong, Nazi Germany, and Tiananmen Square.

For the record, the IOC also placed several limitations on what Olympians could blog, although it mainly involved action shots and "news-like" writing that might compete with the networks who paid for exclusive coverage.

There's an extensive free-speech debate to be had over these kinds of limitaitons and government filters in the digital age, but for now I think I'll take the optimist approach and just be glad that New Zealand canoeists and Canadian synchronized swimmers finally have a place to share their stories.