-By Mike Shields

The sports fan community/social networking site SportsFanLive has launched an official OlympicTweets page, which will aggregate live Twitter chatter from various athletes participating at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, starting on Feb. 12.

In addition, as part of the site’s expansive coverage of The Games, SportsFanLive has partnered with a group of 30 MBA students from George Washington University. That group, made up of students who will be heading to Vancouver to complete a class focused specifically on the Olympics, will be armed with handheld cameras and tasked with producing unique footage from the events for SportsFanLive blog page dubbed Vantastic Voyage.

The site has also gathered together a different group of bloggers from across the country who will camp out in sports bars and attempt to blog during every minute of live coverage during The Games. Those blog entries will be collected at another SportsFanLive site called Olympic Blogathon. SportsFanLive executed a similar stunt during the 2008 Summer Olympics—albeit on a smaller scale—which resulted in over 408 hours of continuous blogging activity.  

The idea behind these atypical reporting tactics was to cover aspects of the Olympics that go beyond mainstream results and athlete profiles, said SportsFanLive founder and CEO David Katz.

“We wanted to create a way for fans to get a different perspective of the Olympics,” he said. “Everything we do is an attempt to be a fly on the wall at events and really represent the soul of the fan.”

SportsFanLive has landed Samsung Mobile as the official sponsor of its Olympic Coverage. Samsung was the site’s first sponsor when it went live in August of 2008 during the Summer Olympics.

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