Bono

We spent four nights in Dublin, and saw two of the three shows. We had General Admission tickets, and arrived early enough to get close to the stage on both nights.

Besides the concerts, we did a lot of walking around Dublin, and did a bus tour to the countryside as well.

I can admit Twitter is a little addicting. A lot of people don’t get why you would want to tell everyone what you are having for lunch, which is what many people’s first impression of the service is. I find it is great for following other people who are experts in my industry to keep current, and as a cycling fan, my Ah Ha momment about why Twitter is so useful was during the Tour of California cycling stage race when team managers, mechanics, fans and other people watching the race were giving Twitter updates from the course and providing more information than the live TV coverage.

Another good recent video I watched about Twitter was a talk given to Google Employees that explains a little more about the why people should care about Twitter.

This year I developed the Hoops Bracket Challenge game for SIKids.com. Much of the game reused elements of the bracket game I produced last year for SI.com, but there were improvements made along the way. I was especially happy with the interface for filling out your bracket which used a css / javascript “sliding window” technique. The game was converted from Oracle to MySQL which was not much of an issue using Ruby on Rails database migrations.

Now if I could only pick games. I didn’t do so well selecting my picks for this year’s tournament.

43. @bikeride: Brent Soderberg from BikeRide.com provides live race updates and news about bicycling events and cycling in general.

I don’t know how much I contribute to the world of pro cycling, but I was also responsible for setting up the @espn_cycling feed (#36) when I worked at ESPN, and I also originally registered the @velonews account (#34) and had it updating with their RSS feed until recently when VeloNews took over managing the account. So, I guess I can take some credit for getting the world of cycling using the service.

I am not Lance Lance Armstrong, but I have taken his photo.

It is really pretty amazing to see how the world of pro cycling, and the bike industry has adopted the use of Twitter in the past few months. I’ve had a Twitter account for nearly 2 years now, and there have been some others within the cycling world who have been using Twitter for a long time, but after the biggest name in the sport, Lance Armstrong, became a power user of the micro blogging service (he now has over 200,000 followers), it really took off in the pro cycling world.

In response to the Mashable post, Joel Price, who works in new media for the San Diego Chargers tweeted “Twitter is saving professional Cycling … other sports should take notice”. And then after Scott Zagarino replied the “You’d think other sports would get the hint?”, Joel replied ” some will, mainstream sports will treat it more like a broadcast medium and miss the point. At least at first.”

This has been my experience working within the mainstream sports media. When a new medium comes along the first response is to try to figure out how to spam the service with content instead of understanding what social media is. Social Media’s power is in joining the conversation, not interupting the conversation.

Why has pro cycling done such a great job of adopting Twitter? I think one reason is that compared to “stadium” sports, pro cycling is a “mobile” sport that takes place out on the open roads, and a service like Twitter that can easily be updated from mobile devices seems like a perfect fit for telling part of the story.

This was evident in the recent Amgen Tour of California stage race. The first few days of the race when weather caused issues for live TV coverage, Twitter users were being kept more up to date on what was happening in the race than the television announcers on Versus. Team managers, mechanics, and staff were tweeting race updates from the team cars, and fans were taking and posting Twitpics from the side of the road.

Can other sports benefit from Twitter? Absolutely. The NBA’s Shaquille O’Neal has more followers than Lance Armstrong (it is close), and you can follow ESPN, or many teams like the San Diego Chargers (thanks to Joel). The biggest power of twitter, and other social media tools, is the ability to connect directly to the people who are interested in what you are doing (including fans, and potential customers), and have a conversation with them.

I still think there is something unique to the sport of pro cycling with competitions that last multiple days, in places all over the world, where you can’t get the whole story from television, and that makes a medium like Twitter more suited to it. Also, major American sports are used to being covered by all the mainstream media, while cycling being more of a niche sport is more open to alternative forms of media to promote itself.

Also See
Carton Reid maintains a list of Bike Trade Tweeters
CyclingUSA Blog: My new blog on American Pro Cycling

ActsAsFlinn and Myself talking to the guys from ThoughtBot

Some of the best things I took away from the conference were to focus on testing, and push to improve the process of the product cycle where I work. I also got a lot out of watching the guys from ThoughtBot talk about refactoring code. They had a lot of good tips.

Nick Quaranto (pictured on the left in the photo above) did a great job live blogging the conference and took notes with all the sessions.

Matt Bauer did a talk about Berkeley DB and used a cycling related application he is working on called Pedal Brain for some of the examples. I talked to him briefly about it, and I am excited to see what comes of it. Hopefully I can help beta test!

This past week I have come across a couple of ideas or terms that I really liked. One is the idea of Disruptive Innovation, and the other is the importance or having a Sense of Urgency.

What is Disruptive Innovation? It is described as a different way of doing things that create new markets or transform an old market by making things more simple. Below is a playlist of a few YouTube videos that better explain Disruptive Innovation.

The other concept that I came across this week is the importance of having a sense of urgency within an organization. I first watched a conversation with John Doerr from the 2007 Web 2.0 conference. He talked about the ingredients that made Google successful, and those included technical excellence, going after an under served market, and having a sense of urgency.

Harvard Professor John Kotter wrote a book called A Sense of Urgency and explains better than I can what it is.

These types of things always inspire me, and this week I think I have come up with a couple of ideas that have the ingredients of disruptive innovation, but now I need a sense of urgency to get them done.

Here are some fun applications that use the Twitter API:

Foamee: This is one of the originals created by Simplebits. If a friend does you a favor you can let them know you owe them a beer or coffee.

Twootball: This is a new app that combines Twitter and a love for the NFL. Tweet while you are watching an NFL game and include the name of a team in your message and it will show up on Twootball.

GoodBad.me: This is a new app created for the Rails Rumble competition. Follow @goodbadme, then if you do something good or bad include #goodme or #badme in your tweet.

Twitter Grader: Put in your Twitter username, and Grader will give you a score based on the power of your Twitter profile.

TwitterVision: This is another oldie but goodie. This is a mashup of Twitter and Google maps so you can see where in the world people are posting their tweets.

The iPhone Blog suggests that Apple may be targeting growth in sales among sports fans.

After releasing the new iPhone “game changer” commercial during the baseball playoffs, it looks like Apple is focusing on expanding the iPhone/iPod Touch product line by reaching sports fans. Good idea? I don’t know maybe Apple is thinking they can turn sports fans into Apple fanboys..

Either way, that thing was BIG. Dare I say life-size. There was no way anyone going on to ESPN.com could miss it (unless you have ad blockers). Effective? Yes. Annoying to scroll down to read the news? You betcha.

They also bring up the point about how it is annoying to have to scroll down almost a whole page to get to the news because of the large size of the ad. I guess when you have a loyal audience you can expect them to put up with some pain, but how much will users put up with before it becomes too much?