Commentary by blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett on the use of blogs for public relations, media, marketing, communication & branding and from time-to-time the unsolicited opinion.
I'm glad to see Floyd Landis win Le Tour this year, especially after that epic ride on Thursday.
Why did I call him Lloyd? Two years ago when I was at the Tour de Georgia watching Floyd win the Stage 3 Time Trial there was a guy behind me that thought his name was 'Lloyd Flanders'. During the event he kept asking, 'When is Lloyd going to come by?'
Waking up late in Seattle this morning I was startled to read about all the riders being dropped/banned from le Tour. What an amazing turn of events. This should blow the race wide open.
It's almost July, which means one thing, Le Tour. As usual, Frank Steele is spinning things up over at TDFBlog.com. Over the past few days Frank has been increasing his post volume, covering the build-up to the race which starts on Saturday with a 7km prologue in Strasbourg.
During the event Frank provides a comprehensive overview of coverage from around the web and blogosphere.
I get to Savannah on Thursday and find out that the Marriott Riverside does not get OLN. Where to watch the Tour?
I called Quailty Bike Shop and asked them for some advice. They suggested Sorry Charlies in downtown Savannah. I went there for a late lunch on Friday and asked if I could come by in the morning and watch the final time trial. The waitress told me they did not open until 11:00am, but that she would be there before 10:00am and that I could come by and watch.
Saturday morning I arrived shortly before 10:00am and couldn't find the girl I talked to. At first I thought I was out of luck. I told Brian, the manager, that one of the waitresses told me that I could come by early. His inital response was, "oh really, who told you that?" Luckily, Brian was really cool and turned on all the TVs and let me sit at the bar to watch Lance win the stage.
Thanx to Brian and the crew from Sorry Charlies. I have nothing but good things to say about them.
CyclingNews.com has posted an interview with Lenny Futura. Who is Lenny Futura? He's the artist that created the unique icon set for Lance Armstrong's Time Trial Bike.
The cool icon set received quite a bit of press when Lance rode the bike to second place in Stage 1 of Le Tour. Nike has had some details of the bike at WearYellow and NikeCycling.com. (See also TDF Blog post)
The article points out that Lenny also created some of the graphics for Lance's 10//2 clothing line.
Yet another Tour podcast. This one is produced by the Discovery Channel Cycling Team and features Dan Osipow calling in twice a day with updates from the Tour.
The podcasts are less than three minutes long and are recordings of Dan calling in via phone. The quality is a bit rough so far, but I think that's a result of calling via cell from Europe.
For those that are new to podcasts, Team Discovery even has a quick guide to get you started. It even has instructions for adding the podcast to iTunes, so they are on top of things.
The Tour de France is only on its first day and there is already tag spam on Technorati. The tag, Tour de France should be rather popular over the next few weeks. This makes it an obvious target for spammers. A search earlier today gave me these results:
The first result (which I will not link to) is a post that has nothing to do with le Tour. It is a site promoting DVR software for your Mac. Unfortunately this will probably get worse as the Tour progresses.
Spoke Radio is offering daily audio updates from the Tour de France, but it is not a podcast. There is no RSS feed for the MP3 files recorded by former Tour/US Postal rider and OLN commentator Frankie Andreu. In order to keep up-to-date you need to visit the site each day and download the file.
I e-mailed Patrick Bulger with Spoke Radio and asked him if he was planning on adding an RSS feed. Patrick didn't know too much about podcasting or RSS so I pointed him to some good online resources. Hopefully Patrick will get an RSS feed up in the next few days.
For now I will stick with the Sirius Tour podcast and check the Spoke Radio site when I get around to it.
So much for a 'soft launch' - Outdoor Life Network (OLN) launched a new web site today to correspond with the start of the Tour de France. There is also an all-new OLN logo as part of the re-branding. On-air coverage of the Tour features the new look as well. I would have probably soft-launched the new site yesterday or perhaps the day before.
The chatter in Bicycling.com's Forum is that the site is not fully operational yet:
I can't believe the decided to do a major overhaul of the site on the day of the TdF! Is it working for anyone else?
Update: Velochimp has some more technical notes about the new OLN site.
Update 2: This is strange, olntv.com works, but www.olntv.com gives you this:
Lance Armstrong's Bike Blog is back in action. The first post of 2005 came yesterday in advance of this year's Tour:
Here we go again, Lance and I rolling through France, for the final time. In 24 days, I'm hanging up my spokes from competitive cycling. From then on, I'll be relegated to being Sheryl's personal bike. Not that having Lance's sweaty behind on my saddle hasn't been great, but I'd much rather ride into the sunset with Sheryl. That's something to crow about.
The blog is part of the Austin American-Statesman newspaper web site and was run last year as well. There is no RSS for the blog, but I did leave a comment asking Mr. Madone if he was planning on adding a feed.
This blog did get some mention during the famous 'Character/Fake Blog Meme' of 2005.
The Tour de France is only a few days away. It sort of crept up on me this year. One of those, "oh man the Tour starts next week." I try to catch the live coverage every day. That means scheduling life around the Tour. If I am travelling or staying in a hotel I need to know if they get OLN ahead of time.
The TDF Blog, the Paceline and CyclingNews will become daily reading (often repeated stops). CyclingNews' live coverage page becomes the homepage on my Blackberry browser.
Frank Steele sends word that Sirius will be doing a daily podcast from le Tour. Frank also linked to this graphic this morning.
It was an insert in the The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, OR. The graphic was designed by Mark Friesen. You can get the full details here.
I don't plan on 'blogging' the Tour unless there is something I really need to say. Once things get going I will put up some links to the other sites/blogs I have been reading.
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