The Internet will not be censored at the Beijing Olympic Games and there will be no delays of the television signal the International Olympic Committee said today.

The International Olympic Committee has issued updated rules for new media covering the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

The rules will allow media organizations to use their own Web sites to host written and photographic coverage of the games if it is for normal journalistic and editorial use. "The Internet is an important medium for the communication and promotion of sport and the Olympic Movement," the IOC said in the guidelines.

The Chinese government says it is cracking down on Internet-based audio-visual programming like podcast and video-sharing sites to ensure content doesn’t pollute the spiritual and cultural ideals of the country. And yeah, that includes pirates, too. That the expanded measures against user-generated media come just months before the Beijing Olympics is just a coincidence.

Right?

Europeans like their TV viewing as much as Americans and nearly half are watching television on the Internet, according to a study from Motorola. The days of waiting until primetime to watch favorite shows are going by the wayside as users are taking control of their viewing.

The motto of next year’s Olympic games in China is “one world, one dream.” Online, the world is actually split up into several countries, each with their own limited view, made possible through national censorship of the web.

Though much of the US Olympic performance left sports fans disappointed, the Olympic website has enjoyed a gold medal showing with the use of Flash throughout it.

Though Fox’s TV pop culture phenom “American Idol” is dominating Olympic coverage in terms of ratings, traffic to NBCOlympics.com nearly quintupled traffic to IdolOnFox.com during the week ending February 12th, Nielsen/NetRatings reports.

Today’s communication technologies – including cell phones, e-mail, and blogs – can drive users to a heavy sense of guilt.

David Jones reminds me via email that Visa also has a blog program going in Canada called Visa Olympics of the Imagination.

MediaPost has details of Coca-Cola’s initiative to send half-dozen bloggers to the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy.

A query on Google for “NBC Olympics” returns a video link to a two-minute advertisement for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Torino, and an unobvious change to Google’s Sponsored Links boxes on top of search results.

Google has added high-resolution imagery of Turin, Italy, to Google Earth and Google Local, so you can see lots of interesting terrain around the Olympic Games.

Spammer groups have begun using new methods in order to dupe unsuspecting people. Keeping with what’s on the surface of popularity, spammers have resorted to including Google and The Olympics within email subject lines in an effort to trick recipients into opening these mailings.

The Olympics RSS feed covers the latest breaking news on medals, events, competitors and more and is immediately available to all users who download the Dogpile Toolbar.