For the first time since I started Operation Gadget, I put this site on hiatus during the The Tour de France. I had promised myself that I would focus only on technology used at the Tour this year, and not talk about race results, strategy, or other news. After the announcement of Patrik Sinkewitz positive doping test on July 18, coverage of the Tour increasingly focused on doping and rule compliance issues.

I was still watching the race, but I didn't feel that the articles I wanted to write were relevant anymore. I also think that the audience for cycling technology information was preoccupied with breaking news. It's generally better for me to hold off on publishing articles that won't get read when they are current.

It's hard to know where professional cycling is going at the moment. Many commentators and long time fans have put a very positive spin on the disqualifications that took place at this year's Tour de France, suggesting that they are indications that the cheaters are being caught and that riders and teams want to abide by the anti-doping rules now. I hope that's the case.

I hope that by next year, the clouds over this great sport will have lifted.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of Frank Steele's projects for this year's Tour de France is TdFwiki.com, a wiki specifically about the Tour. A lot of the information that's been published so far is helpful to Tour fans who are following the race on TV or the Internet. The information that's been published so far includes:

• Information about the current (or most recent) stage,
• News, mainly results from previous stages, and
• Web Resources, including:
• official websites of the Tour de France and broadcast rights holders,
• blogs,
• photo galleries,
• streaming audio,
• podcasts, and
• Twitter.

I contributed the information about streaming audio, podcasts, and Twitter, and linked back to the reviews of these services here on Operation Gadget.

TdFwiki is open for your contributions as well. If you see information that's missing from the wiki, you can create an account for yourself and add it.

I think these are early days for this wiki, but it has several contributors who've been usefully blogging the Tour de France for several years. Frank and his co-authors are adding a lot of valuable information while continuing to blog the Tour in their own ways.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This past week I started using Twitter to follow the live action during stages of The Tour de France that took place while I was at work.

I started using Twitter as a test on Wednesday and Thursday while simultaneously listening to the audio feed from Eurosport. On Friday I used Twitter exclusively for live action updates because Eurosport's audio feed wasn't available.

It took me a little while on Wednesday to figure out how to use Twitter for the purpose of following what other people say. This is because Twitter is designed to be a two-way communication service. You have the option of communicating with it in messages of 140 characters or less at the same time as you receive messages from one or more other Twitter users. The purpose of this is really for you to be able to communicate with your friends or the public in real time. However, Twitter can be used for live blogging all kinds of events as well, and this is what the people who are providing updates during Tour de France stages are doing.

I got started by creating an account for myself on Twitter.com. After I did that, I found my friend Frank Steele from TdFblog.com on Twitter at the following URL: http://twitter.com/TdFblog. It's very difficult to find someone inside the Twitter service. It's much easier to obtain the URL for someone's Twitter account from an external source than to try to find it using Twitter.

Once I found TdFblog on Twitter, I made Frank my friend and started "following" him. This means that messages from him would start appearing on my Twitter page. From there, I could have those messages simultaneously be sent to my mobile phone via text messages, or to an IM account of my choice. I chose to use one of my IM accounts because my Twitter page doesn't automatically update itself and I wanted to see the messages in real time.

The TdFblog page on Twitter shows Frank's messages plus any messages from other Twitter users that he's following. That's how I found TdF_Updates, a Twitter user in London. I added him/her as a friend and followed his messages as well.

I learned about DailyTour from The FredCast Cycling Podcast although Frank is also following him.

The biggest issues I've seen with using Twitter to get real time updates on Tour action are:

1. People say the same thing or something very similar when they are relating action that they see on their televisions.
2. Twitter sometimes gets behind in reporting updates. At the end of Wednesday's stage, the Twitter messages were 10 to 15 minutes behind the Eurosport audio feed. The updates were on time on Thursday. Not sure about Friday.

Twitter is an alternative to the live coverage pages on VeloNews, Eurosport, and other cycling and European sports-related sites. At this point, I don't think it's better than those sources.

Twitter could turn out to be more useful in the future, particularly if people begin using it at races in the USA and Europe where there is no live TV coverage, or if websites start integrating these live feeds into their pages.

Update on July 16, 2007: There's an article on early Twitter uses by TV networks in today's Wall Street Journal. Perhaps Versus and other rights holders will start using Twitter to connect with viewers who are at work during the 2008 Tour.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm spending more time at work during the 2007 Tour de France than I am watching the coverage on Versus. For this reason, I have become a voracious consumer of non-TV information about the Tour. One of the things I've been doing is grabbing Tour de France-specific podcasts from iTunes and listening to them on the commute to work. This way I get 45 to 60 minutes of total immersion into yesterday's Tour news, so it's a good substitute for the Tour Pre-Race Show.

Here are the podcasts I'm listening to at the moment and why:

1. ITV Tour de France Podcast: Approximately 15 minutes of stage highlights and analysis from Matt Rendell and Chris Boardman. The advantage of listening to ITV's podcast is that they are a Tour rights holder, so they can grab excerpts of race action and rider interviews that the other podcasts really can't. Also Boardman is a very good color man.
2. Velonews TDF Podcast: 10 to 20 minutes of analysis with Joe Silva and Thomas Prehn. Prehn is the author of Racing Tactics for Cyclists. You can imagine that this podcast focuses on race tactics. It's probably the most analytical podcast I've heard so far.
3. The Daily Tour Podcast from The FredCast: 20 minutes of stage summary and analysis by David Bernstein. This podcast includes some useful information about Tour information resources and a section on basic information on the Tour for beginners. (The FredCast is a year-round weekly podcast for cyclists, so you may be interested in that podcast in addition to or instead of The Daily Tour).

This is the order in which I listen to the podcasts, which is probably proportional to the value of the information that I get out of each one. Your mileage may vary, depending on the amount of TV time you have, the experience you have in cycling, and the experience you have as a pro cycling spectator.

There are several other Tour-related podcasts that I haven't had the chance to listen to, and I'm not sure when or if I will be able to do so. If you have information about some of the other podcasts, feel free to post it in the comments to this article.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 7 is my sixth wedding anniversary. Kathleen and I are spending weekend in New York City, so I'm trying to follow the Tour de France Prologue using my iPhone.

It isn't as easy as I had hoped.

The Tour de France Official Website talks about a Tour de France YouTube channel. I can't find those video clips using the iPhone YouTube application. The clips that I try to play off links from Safari don't seem to work.

The Velonews Ticker doesn't scroll past the first few entries in the narrative pane of the page. This is not the only dynamically updated page I've seen do this. I need to look at what these pages have in common.

I'll be looking at Frank Steele's articles on TDFblog a lot.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)