We’re a big fan of Walker Tracker competitions here. They help you visualize your progress over a period of time. You can compete as a team or as an individual while poking friendly jibes at each other. Alternately, you can have your own private party, where you (or just you and your friends) are the star of the competition.

But when you walk — you cover real distance, and so it’s especially fun to put that analogy on a real map.

How long does it take to walk along the Grand Canyon? To stride along the Columbia river to the ocean? Now you can find out for sure.

As you walk along, milestones are revealed to you, adding a sense of discovery to your journey.

Map competitions are in beta — but please feel free to hop in and try them out.

We received help from the very talented Adam DuVander, who is writing a book on map development on the web. Thanks Adam!

His latest work – “Snake Oil? Scientific Evidence for Health Supplements” is relevant to anyone who ponders whether to take a Vitamin C for their next cold (spoiler: maybe), take Folic Acid if you’re pregnant (spoiler: Yes!), or Vitamin E for your heart (spoiler: might be best to try something else).

Here’s the image version

The interactive version allows you to isolate them by cause

As my friend Dr. David Naimon pointed out, not all supplements are evenly studied. The chart might be a little deceiving as some of the items low on the list may have also received inadequate testing.

Of course, we expect all of you to:

1) Walk backwards

2) Start counting from 10,000 steps and end at zero.

Best of luck!

The new pricing should allow a company or organization to have a set cost for their walking program, and not worry about how many new members they have signing up. Take a look at our pricing plans here. As always, these come with a 30-day free trial and take about 3 minutes to get up and running on.

All of our front (logged-out) pages have undergone a redesign (Yay!) featuring a greened-out pair of Keen shoes in the banner, and there’s a nifty new upload-and-crop widget for uploading the top banner on your walking program (in admin -> edit layout), or for your profile pictures (in preferences).

Who is using an iPod Nano pedometer? How accurate is it? Are you using Nike+? Should we find a way to automagically pull in the data?

iPod Nano Pedometer Survey >

Feel free to get a jump on the responses! The responses are open – so you’ll be able to see the results (of multiple-choice questions, not the text fields)

text-message integration!

A new Pro feature at Walker Tracker.

There are plenty of times where you just want to text your steps in and call it good.

Now you can – and you can also check up on your friends, get your stats and add a step blog.

Getting started couldn’t be easier, just send your username:password to

our number: 425-522-2960:

Once you do that – your phone is registered and we’ll remember you next time.

Want to add steps – just text us the number: 9,232

Want to send in a date from the past, send us the number plus a date: 9232 Oct15

Or a blog post?

9232 Oct15 Rained in the morning, but I braved the weather and now I’m on top of Mt. Tabor

Here’s @Athena comparing her stats to @Odysseus

Right now this number works best in the U.S. or Canada. (please check with your network carrier for text-messaging fees — we don’t charge for individual texts, but they might)

Check out our page on Mobile Phone Integration for solutions for walkers outside of N. America.

It seems appropriate to follow that up with an incredibly scary walk.

Warning: This video is vertigo-inducing.

More information on this walkway, built in 1905 in Spain, is here: Caminito del Rey

Sweet. I want stairs like that in my house.

At Walker Tracker, we welcome any company teams that want to continue their walking program during the “offseason”.   After touring the world with the GCC2009, now would be a great time to recruit team members for next year’s event by setting up some friendy challenges in Walker Tracker.  Please let us know if you’ve recently completed the GCC – we’re anxious to hear about your experiences.

A lot of what was changed isn’t visible. A ton of small bugs were fixed, code was consolidated and refactored and the groundwork was laid for new, cool stuff down the road.

That said, you should notice a few things, here’s a partial list:

PREFERENCES

– you can now add your real name on the first preferences pane and it will show up in your profile.

POINTS

– Points went out of beta!

– You now receive a fraction of a Giveaway point each time you update. This is somewhat of a big deal, and should result in a far more liquid economy, to use economics-speak.

– You can no longer give your Giveaway points to yourself. This was a hard decision to make, but in the end I think it’ll have a positive difference.

– For administrators, there’s now a Points pane under statistics where you can award Giveaway points or regular points to each user, as well as see who has passed a level recently.

PHOTOS

– All ~32,000 step blog photos were deleted in the process of updating the code during one accidental, anxiety-inducing miscalculation. This was not a planned feature! Fortunately, we keep regular backups around here and all but about 140 were recovered. Those whose photos weren’t recovered have been notified and apologized to. Again, sorry.

– Photos are now stored offsite at a CDN – what this means for you: Quicker photo loading from all geographic locations, better backup in case of a fail.

– Group (team) competitions now show photo backgrounds like individual competitions

COMPETITIONS

– there’s now an example competition called “Challenge Three Greek Myths!”. Simply clicking on that link will set up a one week competition between you, Icarus, Athena and Odysseus. Our community Walker Tracker walkers have been able to challenge those three to a competition for a while – so this is a nice bonus for the custom walking programs and a good way to learn how competitions work.

– You can now run a Group Goal Challenge around Averages.

ADMINISTRATION PANEL

– the aforementioned points panel

– There’s a setting to require walkers to enter their real names.

– There’s a new admin support area that will be going live today. It doesn’t have a lot of content there yet, but this will be a great way for administrators to share information about their programs, seek help, and submit help tickets. You’ll see the link on the home page of your administration panel.

– billing is now automated, as of today

– Ability to reset all data for your program and start from scratch

– new data downloads, with clearer explanations

– Bulk registration template

WALK-THROUGH

Want to see what a Walker Tracker custom program is like before you try out the 30-day free trial? Have a look at our Walk-Through

We’re going to have a scheduled downtime for approximately 30 minutes starting at 4pm today for updates and maintenance.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

See you on the other side.

I realized then that this is one  the great things about having a website with a reward mechanism — in this case a point-system. I can put a price on spammers. This works well in just about every way.

1) I’m alerted to users who, because of the number of signups, it’s prohibitive for me to find

2) Members of the community are awarded for spotting these

3) Both of us benefit from having the spammer gone.

It’s crowd-sourced spam control.

The alternate scenario is:

1) I likely wouldn’t see the spam

2) It would annoy another member, or make them feel like there was low quality control on the site (or the site was being overrun)

3) I might get notified, depending upon if I’d had personal contact with that person, or if they felt like it was worth the effort.

The ease-of-reporting is also an important factor – and so building a reporting system into the site is on the list.

Depending upon your budget, I’ve definitely found that nicer pedometers encourage people to stick with walking. A pedometer is a cheap investment already — and so I would encourage everyone to bypass the $1 – $5 pedometers and go for something that will:

1) Last you

2) Not count a bunch of steps for non-walking activities

3) Be very wearable (most of the people on Walker Tracker wear their pedometer all day, every day)

A pedometer like this is going to cost you in the neighborhood of $10 – $40. Walking really is one of the cheapest physical activities.

My favorite pedometers are the ‘pocket pedometers’ — you don’t need to clip them on, you just put them in your pocket and they’ll count fine from there. The cheapest of these is the Omron HJ-112, which is about $20 at Amazon. Its big brother is the Omron HJ-720ITC. If  you are ordering in bulk, you might try onlinefitness.com for a discount.

For cheaper options – the Omron HJ-150 and HJ-151 are both decent, sturdy pedometers. It’s also worth checking out  what pedometers our community likes here —  it looks like other highly-rated pedometers according to our community are the Sportline 345, Sportline 350, Yamax DigiWalker CW-701, New Lifestyles NL-2000.

In order of features, I like:

• wearable in a pocket. If you don’t wear it, it’s not going to do you any good.
• memory (usually 7 days – I like to see how I’ve done over a week, and it’s useful for entering on Walker Tracker)
• resets at midnight
• sturdiness
• can’t ‘fake’ steps (uses an accelerometer over a pendulum. Or rather, it’s much harder to fake steps)
• a continuous activity measure (on Omron pedometers this is called ‘aerobic steps’ (in the newer ones, for some reason they renamed this to ‘moderate steps’ - it measures when it feels you’ve been walking long enough to benefit your heart)

There are lots of other metrics that pedometers can calculate — miles walked, calories burned, etc, but most of these are just mathematical calculations based on the number of steps you’ve walked. They’re useful features, but not absolutely necessary.

Best of luck!

You play yourself, using statistics and charts to achieve a better average, walk more and game yourself into better physical shape.

You compete with others in Walker Tracker Competitions

However, we wanted to go one better by creating a sense of progression and currency to the system. We wanted to find a way to reward positive behavior, and to allow our walkers to reward each other.

I spent a lot of time looking at other systems that do this. Role playing games, World of Warcraft, slashdot/digg, school, life, economies, etc. In creating the system I tried to create mathematical point calculations that would reward fairness and walking improvement as well as to create a functioning ecosystem with a balance of supply and demand.

In Walker Tracker’s Levels/Points system

• You can earn points
• You can give away points
• With a certain amount of points you gain a level
• A level is mostly a symbol of progress and status
  • That said, gaining levels does open up new features on Walker Tracker, and you do receive more ‘Giveaway points’ each time you ‘level up’. More is planned for tying features and secret parts of Walker Tracker to the level system.

The most important metric we can track is Diligence. One of the largest goals of Walker Tracker is to permanently change one’s lifestyle behavior. To build physical activity into a routine. Walking every day, logging your steps, measuring your change is one of the best things we can help you accomplish. That which is measured, improves. For that reason, levels and points are weighted heavily toward diligence and meeting your own goals. It’s not a measure of how many steps you’ve walked, but whether you’re achieving what you set out to do by joining a walking program.

So far, I think it’s going fantastically well. I feel an excitement at each time I progress up a level or receive points from someone else.

Let us know what you think!

If you want to become a level one walker right now, all it takes is your first step entry!

Sign up to get started

Plus, I like that it ‘verbs’ what we do here: myCompany.walkz.org!

Check it out in our Custom Walking Program page.