Unlike back in the day when I was with CNNSI.com, real-time biometric and GPS data on the competitors in the Tour de France is now apparently being published into the public domain. Typolis/Ubilabs have created an amazing mashup between Google Maps and data being published by SRM. Here is the result – realtime tracking of the riders, complete with heartrate, speed and similar metrics. Very slick – and better than what I’ve seen on the ‘big sites’ – including ESPN.com. Too bad we can’t see Lance or his disqualified heirs to the yellow jersey.
So my old buddies in the new media department of The Savannah Morning News are going all Web 2.0 and relaunching their web presence from a very 1999-era treatment to a clearly forward-looking model incorporating user generated content (blogs, flickr-like photo products etc), a clean (if gradient-heavy) design, and other helpful features like RSS. The beta of the site is available here; the old site is here. Like most newspaper sites today, there is a level of content that requires registration – but taking a page from MySpace and AIMPages, has the added benefit of giving the user a personalized home page where you can post entries, photos, link to other sites, etc. Kudos to the editorial and technical teams for putting this well conceived next-gen newspaper site together. Now if only there were a nice gallery of all my photos I shot during my time there at the then News-Press from 1989-1994, I’d be really happy!
I’ve spent some time this weekend working on digitizing and editing videos we’ve taken of Sam over the last six months. The big result of that project was a DVD with all the clips, but I’m slowly working on short outtakes for the blog. I’m using YouTube.com, one of many Web 2.0 sites allowing user-generated content like this to have a (free!) home on the web. This should make it easier for everyone to see these clips. Up first – Sam’s very first visit to the beach when we were in Sarasota in March, visiting Amy’s mom and dad. Click on the ‘play’ triangle in the image above to start video playback in this window – total run time is 2:47.
Okay all you geeks out there – now for something really useful coming out of the Web 2.0 biddness – a fresh-for-2006 site to let you research, catalog and of course – TAG – your wine drinking – WineLog.net. The site includes a nice bit of integration with mobile, allowing a user to send wine details to a portable device. Along with trying to remember to send moblog photos of any wines we drink to the Flickr Wine Memory Jogger group. It’s free to register on WineLog, so give it a try – I know I will.
Web 2.0 biddness – a fresh-for-2006 site to let you research, catalog and of course – TAG – your wine drinking –