18 Jun 09 A Great Solution to Tracking My Racewalk Distance and Pace: Runkeeper

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Recently, I was rolling along on my weekly racewalk with the Columbus-based Buckeye Striders walking club when I noticed a troubling thing. The borrowed Polar heart rate monitor watch buckled securely around my right wrist had come unfastened. In fact, the watch band had broken, and would need to be sent to the factory for a lengthy repair process.

Though I could use an older HRM for heart rate, suddenly I was facing not being able to track my distance, pace and speed. And if you’re into racewalking or running, those things matter a lot.

What to do?

Only one thing to do: iPhone. I checked the iTunes app store and discovered a number of innovative potential solutions to my time/distance/pace tracking problem. I settled on one called Runkeeper and dutifully downloaded the Lite or free version.

And boy am I glad I did. Runkeeper uses the iPhone 3G’s GPS chip to give me almost all the information I’d ever want. It’s a great app that I’d recommend to others, based on my use so far.

Runkeeper keeps track of (and displays) my elapsed time, pace (e.g., 14.03 min/mile), distance, and the ups and downs of the courses elevations.

There’s even a map feature that will overlay where you’ve walked on a Google-type map.

If that’s not enough, Runkeeper sends your data to its website, Runkeeper.com. Here, you can aggregate all the information about your walking sessions in a central place, even choosing to share them with friends via Twitter. There are options for aggregating totals by week or month. Quite handy.

I’m using the free version of Runkeeper. There’s also a paid Pro version ($9.99 US) that adds audio cues, informing you as you pass mile points. A new version, awaiting app store approval, will add the ability to use the audio cues to coach you thru custom-designed interval workouts. Sweet.

I’ll still use a heart rate monitor on my walks, but thanks to Runkeeper, I probably won’t have to replace the expensive model I had been using. And, thanks to Runkeeper, I’ll know where I’ve been, how far I’ve gone and how fast I’ve gotten there.

Good old iPhone!

29 Jan 09 Learning the Tools and Philosphy of Political Participation

Ten days. Obama was sworn in as POTUS just ten days ago. But in terms of participation and transparency, it seems light years removed from recent practices.

The Obama people didn’t invent social media or participation or transparency on the web. But they’ve used it masterfully to get in office and start the ball rolling. It’s been a promising ten days with regard to that sort of thing, and we’ll see how it all plays out.

Now some Canadians want to explore the same sort of tools and participation philosophy. At least those were some of the things discussed in a recent “unconference” called Change Camp. The CBC’s Nora Young discussed the Camp with social media consultant Mark Kuznicki this week. You can find this interview on the CBC Spark site.

Change Camp sought to scratch the itch some Canadians feel for the openness promised by the young Obama adminstration. Obama has raised expectations about web tactics among folks interested in politics and government; Change Camp offered to teach them about some of those tactics.

But here’s the most interesting thing, at least to me: Change Camp went beyond tools and techniques to explore big ideas related to the philosophy of participation. Stuff like what does it mean to re-imagine how we do government or how we are citizens?

Perhaps the most exciting part is what can happen next. Just like anything with the social web, these ideas can be shared, finding their way almost anywhere. The hope is that local change camps can spring it to offer participation at ever finer levels of the political process.

01 Jan 09 Measuring Fitness with Body Composition and the Bodpod

OK, it’s the first of the year and many people are vowing this is the year they’re going to get in shape. Great. But how to you get technology as an ally in your quest?

Enter the Bodpod, a high tech contraption that measures how much muscle and fat you’re carrying. You’d expect controlling your diet and getting some exercise would reduce your fat and increase your muscle.

But don’t just assume that’s happening. The Bodpod measures what’s going on with your body composition. And it does it quickly, cheaply and painlessly. Here’s a video I shot this week at Baseline Fitness, our local purveyor of bodpod goodness.

Tags: Bodpod, Body composition, Fitness, Health, Muscle, Weight loss

18 Dec 08 One Door Closes, Another Opens (for some)

One door closes and another one opens. I wouldn’t normally think that about something like journalism. But when cutbacks in Washington news bureaus combine with lots of new DC news events, something’s gotta happen. It’s not necessarily the end of the line for every reporter let go.

Main Street and Wall Street may be hurting, but I am guessing that 2009 could be a growth year for Web 2.0-savvy journalists on K Street.

link: Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits

18 Dec 08 News and Information Comes to You

I use RSS feeds everyday. A lot of RSS feeds. So when I causally mention RSS to people I meet, I’m always surprised when they don’t know what it is.

RSS is a way to read content from sites that you want to stay update with. Only you don’t have to use your browser to surf to each of those sites.

Instead, you use one application, called a feed reader or aggregator, to collect information from each of the sites. In essence, the news and information you’re interested in comes to you, instead of you going to it.

The Common Craft video included in this post explains it much better than I ever could.

06 Dec 08 Give Us a Break: Treat the Treatable

I wasn’t really surprised to read that people in the U.S. spend more on health care than other countries. And it wasn’t a big shock to find out we’re not getting healthier for our burgeoning health care spending.

But as I continued reading this week’s Lab Notes in Newsweek, something did stop me in my tracks – the U.S. has the worst mortality rate for treatable conditions than 18 other industrialized nations according to  a recent report.

I mean, come on. We spend more than anyone else on the planet and get less for it? (The Newsweek column cites reports and papers that spell out stats and reasons.)

I think this points to two things we might do to improve things. First, we all need to take more responsibility for our own health. Obesity has doubled in the last 19 years. So maybe paying attention to diet and exercise isn’t a bad idea. That might help.

But what about going down the tubes from treatable conditions? Seems to me efforts at reforming the health care and related industries is an idea whose time has come. Really.

Tags: Health, Health care, Health care prices, Health Policy, Mortality rate

30 Nov 08 Personal Information Privacy: An Anomaly?

New York Times writer John Markoff takes a look at what widespread use of all those digital devices and services we’re using might mean in terms of personal information privacy. The last paragraph of that article really got my attention. But more about that later.

Our use of computers, smart phones and almost any other digital device can record what we’re doing, leaving a trail of individual information behind. Researchers are starting to tap into the information warehouse that results from tracking millions of people’s goings on.

There’s even a new term for this: collective intelligence.

Now, a blinding flash of the obvious tells you the vast databases of this collective intelligence could be abused. Think of health insurance companies with access to vast amounts of collective and individual behavioral data. It doesn’t take Nostradomus to predict what could happen to coverage and premiums.

But there’s another side to the debate. What about the collective public good that could come of collective intelligence? For example, in tracking, predicting and ultimately preventing the spread of really bad diseases.

Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he (Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.

“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”

About that last paragraph. One of the most interesting things here is the idea that the concept of individual privacy itself is not big deal.

Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.

“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

Tags: Alex Pentland, individual information privacy, John Markoff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York Times, personal information privacy, privacy, Security, Thomas W. Malone

25 Nov 08 What Makes a Corporation Too Big to Fail?

What is “too big to fail?” I’ve heard that term bandied about around this week’s Citibank bailout by our own Uncle Sam.

Ironically, one answer comes from a Washington Monthly piece on community banks titled Too Small to Fail.

Already, just three institutions, Citigroup, Bank of America, and J. P. Morgan, hold more than 30 percent of the nation’s deposits and 40 percent of bank loans to corporations.

Half of all Americans do business with Bank of America.

OK, that got my attention. These institutions are indeed more gigantic than anything I could imagine. I suppose letting them go belly up really would make tremendous amount of shit hit the fan. We don’t want that.

But let’s not let this sort of thing pass without learning a thing or two, if that’s possible. Ryan Chittum puts it very well in CJR:

There’s a serious conversation that needs to take place about the consolidation in our economy—especially in finance. If something is too big to fail, it should be disassembled to the point where its collapse would no longer endanger the rest of us.

Tags: Citibank, Financial Services, Washington Monthly

23 Nov 08 Earning Online Reputation and Authority

If I’m understanding Steven Hodson’s riff on Seth Godin’s earlier post, old media like the New York Times are losing online reputation and authority along with ad and circulation revenue. And The Times didn’t have to come to this, but they’ve dragged their corporate feet on adopting new media strategies that could have let them grow within the new environment.

But this doesn’t mean new media like blogs et al will take their place. They have to earn their own online reputation and authority. Without those two qualities, it doesn’t matter whether they are old or new.

Hm, maybe.

But I’m certainly not looking forward to opening my front door on Sunday morning and not finding a thick copy of The Times waiting for me.

Technorati Tags:
internet marketing, online marketing, media, new media, old media

24 Oct 08 Best Jokes on Earth: Where They Came From

I don’t know if this is one of the best jokes on earth: “Why do farts smell? So deaf people can enjoy them, too!”

Groan. Maybe you’re thinking “Gee, did he remember that from grade school?” Well, maybe.

But this joke is older than that. Much older. How about 1,500 years old? That’s at least according to author Jim Holt who wrote a book about the history of jokes, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

Then there was the smackdown the Spartans pulled on Phillip of Macedon. When he wrote them that : “If I conquer your country, I will raze Sparta to the ground,” they responded, centuries before Henny Youngman, with a one liner. Their one-word answer: “If.”

Technorati Tags:
best jokes on earth, best jokes