As access to high speed internet continues to increase globally, it is fascinating to watch how much more access to the games fans get every four years. Where consumers once had to wait for the official broadcast on a limited number of TV stations, this year content will be created by athletes, volunteers, and spectators across all types of social media.

As we’ve pointed out before in Friday5’s about following conferences, doing searches on Flickr, blogs, and Twitter for mentions of the tags will be one way to follow along. This week we will look at five others ways you can follow the Olympics online in addition to coverage on mainstream media and searching for the tags Olympics, Beijing or the name of your favorite athlete.

1.       Fring is a South African based start-up that allows users to being PC-capabilities to their mobile phones. Today Fring announce that they will have six micro-bloggers covering the Olympics in Russian, English and Spanish.

2.       Lenovo is a worldwide sponsor of the Beijing Olympics and will be twittering and blogging. The blog will feature posts from 100 athletes and should be a great way to hear what it is like from the point of view of the Olympians. The site allows you to filter by language, country and sport.

3.       Edelman’s own Nick Wolaver has already started blogging at Olympic Rings and Other Things. He is in Beijing with the British Columbia Canada Pavilion and is one of many Edelman staffers on-site working with clients.

4.       If you are outside of the US, Canada or Europe, then YouTube has a special channel for you. The Beijing2008 channel is available in countries that do not have digital video-on-demand deals with the IOC.

5.       Mashable, the blog about social networks, pulled together a list of 25 Sites to Experience the Beijing Summer Olympics. Wired magazine created a wiki where people can add information about how to watch the Olympics online. So if we missed it in this Friday5, they’ve got you covered.

How are you watching the Olympics online?

UPDATE: Between writing this and the opening ceremonies, 080808 became the official tag of the Olympics.

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