Archive for July, 2009

Sadly, Chris Hipp passed away yesterday. Some will remember him as a great cyclist. Others as a Blade Server innovator and inventor. We’re thinking of his friends and family.

Good list of blogs…

Blogs.com published a Top-Ten List for the Tour De France 2009 that we compiled for them. Note that the format of the list requires a blog to have an RSS feed. We can’t deeplink into a site like Versus or Bicycling for Bobke’s blog without it. The list isn’t exhaustive, limited to ten, so we had to choose. Please add what blogs you follow in the comments. We can extend the list here.

We also hope Horner blogs about the race with notes on what he would’ve done on the hilly stages had he been there! We’ll discuss the race at length on the Hub, as soon as it starts.

• Andy Schleck — Andy is a Tour favorite and brother of Frank, another racer. He’s aggressive on the road and writing about his experiences as a professional cyclist.
• Cycling Fans Anonymous — A blog written by a critic of professional cycling, including the doping controversies.
• Cyclocosm — An independent view of bike racing with in-depth commentary.
• Peloton Post — Professional photos from the Tour de France, uploaded daily.
• Podium Cafe — Bike racing blog with extensive coverage of the Tour.
• Road Diaries — Rider diaries, tech talk, and more from SRAM, a bicycle components manufacturer.
• Tour De France Blog — A fan-written blog about the Tour de France with lots of comments.
• Tour Tag on Flickr — Fans and photographers upload photos from the race to Flickr.
• Tour de France Lantern Rouge — A blog that celebrates the last- placed rider in the race.
• Tour de France on Twitter — Follow #tourdefrance on Twitter for tweets from racers, teams, and fans.

Also see a collection of TDF-related gear on our Amazon Store and Wired published a list of why geeks should love the Tour.

Google now enables you to hunt down all those free images faster…

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

I love creative marketing– especially when it is designed to save lives: The first heavy rains after summer bring the highest death toll on New Zealand roads. To alert people to the dangers of driving in the wet, we created billboards that bleed everytime it rained. This year in Papakura, there were no deaths during the easter period.

Interesting conversation with John Hagel. I like these points…

• The need to shift from firewall around the company mentality to a modularized firewall around core company IP
• How you cannot participate in knowledge flows for very long if you are only a “taker”
• The importance of face-to-face in building trusted relationships
• The importance of having hyper-local face-to-face components in large online community
• The balance between the need to increase the number of partners we engage with with the need to build deep relationships in order to allow knowledge flow
• The talent Dilbert paradox and how talent is motivated by the talent development
• How you need a high growth strategy to attract and keep talent
• The importance of the “collaboration curve” in scaling the organizational learning, which they described in detail on their new blog – The Big Shift
• The importance for companies to start adopting a federated view/architecture for their online community efforts