Velog: a social networking site for cyclists
Posted by Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor) on August 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 am
Portland cyclist and web development guru Brian Ellin has created Velog, a social networking site for cyclists.
Ellin says the site is, "like a blend of Twitter.com and the Bike Commute Challenge website."
The site is "city centric" to encourage users to find other cyclists with similar riding interests nearby. Once signed up, users can log rides, post updates, add friends, and create groups and communities.
Velog also allows users to compare ride hours, distances, etc... through cool looking charts. Here's an example of five riders' saddle time over one week:
Another cool feature is that all riders and group velogs have RSS feeds, which allows for easy exporting. Each velog and group also comes with an embeddable "widget", HTML code you can copy/paste to your own website to display your activity.
The site just launched earlier this month and so far there are 21 riders listed from Portland.
Sign up, log in, and start Velogging!
UPDATE: Brian Ellin wrote in to say he's created a BikePortland.org group. Nine people have already signed up! Go check it out. I might integrate the group posts into my sidebar...
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Keen, I\'ll be watching this one. Velog currently has some layout issues in Safari, and doesn\'t appear to allow importing data, but is nicely simple. Numbers-oriented folks may not care for it (it logs time to the nearest 5 minutes and doesn\'t support cadence, heart rate, elevation, max speeds, etc.), but on the upside it sure makes data entry less onerous. Great for rough stats. The Twitter analogy is a good one.
I\'ve been using We Endure, from another Portland-based developer, which doesn\'t seem to have been mentioned on BikePortland before. It\'s less Web 2.0ey, and extends itself to swimming and running for the triathlete trifecta, but supports capturing and tracking more data, tagging, associating mapped routes, and group forums. A different kind of animal. Take your pick :)
RecommendedTwitter is quite possibly the worst \"web 2.0\" nonsense ever. I hope this evolves quickly into something more useful.
RecommendedI\'d be interested, but requiring that OpenID stuff seems lame.
RecommendedFUN !
Recommendedand an obvious indication that i\'m not training enough...
Wow! Thanks for posting this Jonathan. Velog has been online for one week, and as of right now just hit one hundred riders.
I\'m a huge fan of cycling logs like weendure.com. They do lots of things really well and are great for athletes.
Velog\'s focus, however, is on simplicity and inclusion. It probably won\'t ever have more fields than time and distance, and is designed to be a place where you can quickly log your ride with a note, maybe check out what your friends rode today, and get back to your life. This makes it useful not only to athletes, but also to bike commuters, mountain bikers, cyclocrossers, unicyclers, messengers, weekend warriors, and anyone and everyone in between.
There is also a mild peer pressure thing happening on velog. Your friends know what you are riding and if they see you are commuting or training a lot, they might be inspired to ride more themselves.
Anyway, it\'s really new and was created to build and bridge cycling communities and get people really excited about riding bikes. It\'ll be fun to see where it goes. Thanks for reading, Brian
PS -
I created a bikeportland group on velog. Everyone is welcome to join!
http://velog.org/group/bikeportland-org
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