BikeChatter.com: Pro Cycling @ twitter and live Amstel Gold chat
Bicycle racing, especially professional road cycling, is really the only sport I follow, but I do so with a passion. Other people are glued to the TV during soccer games, or football, or basketball, or cricket, or whatever. I'm there during the current spring classics season (my favorite races of the year), and the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France.
So it was a cool discovery to find people like Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Robbie McEwen and others using Twitter. Some of them really provide a unique window into the life of a professional bike racer, especially all the things that we don't see outside race day.
I figured that if it's interesting to me, it's probably interesting to other people too, so I put together this site to aggregate twitter updates related to professional cycling:
As an extra, I also added a chat widget from Mibbit.com, in order to make it easy to chat with others while races are going on:
http://www.bikechatter.com/chat
The next race is the Amstel Gold classic, in the Netherlands, today (Sunday April 19th), at about 15:30 CEST (Rome, Paris, Berlin, etc...). Feel free to join us!
The site is quite new, and probably has a few bugs, and as is obvious, my UI ideas are to make things very simple and direct, so any comments or suggestions on how to improve it, or new features you'd like to see are welcome.
... and now I'm off for my Sunday bike ride - see you this afternoon!
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://journal.dedasys.com/trackbacks?article_id=2148
about {{count}} hours later:
Ahh haa, you are following the exact same ones as I am. Seeing as I am a Team Astana fan, which may sound like you are as well seeing as you have Levi and Lance. I will definitely be keeping an eye on your new site, great job!
about {{count}} hours later:
That worked pretty well, and I had fun. I'll be setting up the chat for Fleche Wallone and Liege Bastogne Liege too.
about {{count}} hours later:
Beautiful! I looked for an Atom feed, then realized a feed isn't the ideal way to track these updates. So, do you mind gatewaying these to XMPP? Thanks! :)
about {{count}} hours later:
There's a fairly huge list of bike twitterers over at http://www.bikebiz.com/news/29866/Bike-trade-tweeters
You just seem to have the riders/DS/team ones, but the cyclingfans, steephill and tourdetweets ones for example are good for getting actual coverage (not to mention a lot of the chatter on the #procycling hashtag)
about {{count}} hours later:
Oh, sorry about that double post. nothing seems to happen when you click submit...
1 day later:
Baz - thanks for the link, that's a great list!
I'm thinking of how to expand things to include other stuff. I don't think twitter is the best way of getting live coverage, but occasionally there is something interesting from the #procycling 'channel'.