Nick Cowie » social networks

Twitter and the Tour de France

Nick — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:25:57 +0000

I am fan of procycling an particularly the grand tour events, the Tour De France (TdF), Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana. It all started years ago when I started cycling and SBS started showing selected stages. I quickly realised it is not the best cyclist that wins, but a combination of cyclist, team and strategy and I was hooked.

Back then, I did not look for information online while watching the TdF. I would always catch up the next morning with the results and preview that day’s stage. Over the years that has slowly changed. Last year, while watching the Tdf, I used FriendFeed to talk to cycling fans and kept up to date with various websites. Even managed to find streaming video to catch stages before SBS started broadcasting and some stages of the Vuelta.

However, everything changed at the Tour Down Under when Lance Armstrong introduced Twitter a large number of top professional cyclists. Once you found them you get a better understanding of what is happening and finding out the news quickly. For example Levi Leipheimer broken wrist and having to abandon the tour, the same way most news outlets did by a Lance Armstrong tweet. Again today’s abandoment by Tom Boonen via a Steven de Jongh tweet.

In addition to riders, you have twittering team managers, mechanics and other personnel, cycling journalists as well as other cycling fans. The big advantage of being in contact with other fans on twitter is you can find resources quickly, including streaming video, I watched every stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré and Giro this year, thanks to Twitter. When races did not have streaming video or audio, there was a twitterfeed of what was happening in the race.

A few tips

Search on #procycling hashtag, find the hashtag for the event, for the Tour de France it is #tdf and open a search window in tweetdeck to follow a race.

Follow Steephill and Cycling Fans for the latest resources.

Go follow some procycling twitters and you will often find that procyclists follow other procyclists.

Government agencies and social media strategies

Nick — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:01:24 +0000

I have started writing a series of posts on Government agencies and social media strategies over on my other blog. The first Why government agencies need a social media strategy was written last week. The second is a rather dry look at the workings of Social Media Strategy and Social Media Policy in Government was posted tonight. The third on the less dry How to get your agency interested in a Social Media Strategy, should be arrive in a few days, I just need to find the right examples.

The examples I am seeking are not of government agencies using social media, but social media about government agencies, so if you know of any blogs, facebook groups etc about government agencies and their policies by clients, citizens or ex-employees, please let me know.

Why am I writing about Social Media Strategy and Government. I am the first to admit I am not an expert social media strategist. However, I do know a lot about social media and I have spent close to a dozen years working in the policy and communications sections of various government departments, so I have a good understanding of Government Communications Strategy. That combination is rare, so I willing to put my opinions out there.

A funny thing happened on the way to Plurk

Nick — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:39:01 +0000

About six weeks ago, the Twitter failwhale raised it’s ugly head and like many of my twitter friends headed off to look at alternatives, the two new kids on the block that week where Plurk and FriendFeed. Over 50 of my twitter friends joined both Plurk and FriendFeed.

Most of my twitter friends only had a brief encounter with FriendFeed, before heading over to Plurk, where a few have become regular users. From what I can gather most of my twitter friends found it difficult to locate their friends on FriendFeed, this was before Better FriendFeed recommended script appeared and you had to rely on the limited tools available on FriendFeed of importing friends from Twitter with the same username. It was easier to get accquire friends from friends in Plurk than FriendFeed.

Instead I stuck round FriendFeed, made use of the of the recommended friends which was promoting A-list blogger and found some new friends, or rather interesting people who talked about subjects that interested me.

So now I have two distinct social networks, Twitter based around people I know and have met, with a number of friends of friends and few interesting people I have not met. FriendFeed is mainly interesting people I have not met and a few friends from Twiiter who made the jump.

What have I learnt from this experience

If you are creating a social network:

Your best chance of keeping users past the initial exploration phase, you need to make it easy to import your friends from other networks and also make it easy to acquire friends from friends.
If you can not do that, make sure they can find interesting people. Because a few people might stick around and might even bring a few people back

If you are a user investigating a new social network and can not find your usual friends, why not explore and find some interesting people, you might be surprised what the rewards will be.

This blog has been pimped

Nick — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:20:04 +0000

I was hoping for a quiet night watching the Tour De France, checking FriendFeed occasionally. I was surprised to see Duncan Riley posted 70 fresh blogs for your Feed Reader on Inquisitr and in the OPML file is the feed for this blog and the feed for my side project Gov2.info. So I thought I better pull a Louis Gray and write a blog post in 20 minutes thanking Duncan for the plug.

So Duncan thank you for the plug. I did not expect this to happen, when I added my two RSS feeds to Duncan&38217;s FriendFeed post, requesting blog post feeds of his friends and friends of friends. I might be shameless self promoter, but not on this scale.

So if you are reading my blog for the first time, welcome. I will try to post more regularly, though I have made that promise before. At the moment I tend to write about social networks, because that is what I am interested in as well as well as front end web development.