Lots of bike news

Fuzzy went in for repairs yesterday, mostly because he needed it sooner rather than later, but also because I was driving to work anyway so that I could safely give blood at lunchtime and not have to ride home. But there’s lots of online cycling developments this week.

Swindon Cycle Challenge

One it the Swindon Cycle Challenge! I only found out about this at the weekend and it started on Monday. The idea is to incentivise people to go and ride a bike for 10 minutes or 1 mile, by running a workplace competition, giving spot prizes to individuals who enter, and team prizes to the companies/departments who get the highest percentage of staff on a bike!

It’s really clever and seems to have lots of good backing. They’ve sent me a goodie bag of lollipops, cycle computers, lights, keyrings, reflective strips and puncture repair kits, and have generally been very helpful in promoting it around the office.

Everyday Cycling

Everyday Cycling have also just released more community features, like groups, blogs, messages and rankings. Like social networking for cyclists.

I don’t really understand why this is of benefit over traditional social networking – just join a cycling group on Facebook or something?

Plus, at the moment, the site is really SLOW, so I won’t be looking around for too long.

Shame, maybe as it develops and comes out of beta it will be good, but for the time being I’m sticking with Bikely for routes, MyCyclingLog.com for logging and, well, Facebook and Twitter for social networking.

Update

I think that when I wrote this it was my internet connection that was slow. The site is pretty quick now and actually pretty full of useful stuff. Maybe it is worth checking out after all!