Jeroen

Part 2 of the Worlds coverage on Youtube by Billy Harris. More impressions from the training and from Switzerland in general.

PS nice background music.

A short list of who’s covering what about the Freestyle Worlds 2009 on the web:

• ICF Freestyle World Championships. The official ICF page with announcements in both English and German (pretty much mixed).
• Kayak Session is the official media partner of the event. They made a special page for news about the event where you can find regular in-depth reports as the events progresses.
• World Kayak is also reporting about the worlds, although the content they published so far looks like copies of the ICF articles.
• Freecaster.tv will bring live streaming of the complete finals. The page currently show a countdown.
• Various blogs are reporting from Thun. The most active bloggers are those paddling for the boat brands that are best represented at the worlds: Jackson Kayak and Wavesport
• Twitter has become very popular during the past year and is also being used to report short messages from Thun.
• Playak has a special page called the Thun Twitterwall, which lists and links to all news mentioned above and more (tweets, photos, blogs, videos, news, podcasts, and forum discussions in 5 languages). A condensed version of the wall is also shown on the right side of every page on Playak.
  The freecaster video streaming of the finals will be shown right on top of the Playak front page on Saturday and Sunday September 5&6.

If you know of more online coverage from the Worlds, please let me know and I’ll update this post.

Nice video by Keegan Grady. Consider this an ‘Introduction to paddling in Thun’.

Some pretty shallow interviews by Billy Harris

This is a nice wave train after the second lock in Thun, about half a mile from the Worlds Wave.

It’s here on the map: http://playak.com/map.php?om=32760 (webcam).

We flew in on Friday, from Zurich, through Atlanta, to Salt Lake City. Why is it that Atlanta always spells delays, inefficiency, and trouble? It’s almost impossible to get through customs there. This time we missed the connecting flight to SLC and ended up being on the road for a full 24 hours. Last time was even worse. That was 4 years ago. I had broken a toe 2 days earlier and the day I landed in Atlanta was the day that the infamous ‘shoe bomber’ was arrested. Homeland Security warning level Red! Imagine standing in a very slow line with a broken toe and major sleep deficit for 5 hours! I swear this was the last time I’ll travel through Atlanta!

Otherwise, all fine here. We’ll go have a look at the setup of the Open Air Demo today. It’s extremely hot though: yesterday was 104F / 40C degrees. The air is so dry, that it still feels comfortable though and I didn’t loose a drop of sweat. Just burned my fingers on the steering wheel and my GPS almost melted when I had forgotten it in the car.

Here are some photos from the temporary Playak headquarters in Salt Lake City:

A cool headcam video of the rhine falls descent, made for the film festival in Germany, February 2007:

Thanks to bondle.de

I have been working on a new service that puts registered Playak users on a Google map.

The idea is that my server tries to find out where each user is located and then puts that information in the database. At one point, users will be allowed to change that info (my server's guesses are not always correct), but that's for further study.

One big problem is that we have about 10000 registered users, and if I put all of those on a map, your browser's javascript will go crazy by the huge amounts of data, i.e. you'll wait forever before you see something… I'm not sure yet how to solve that problem. If anybody has any ideas, please let me know. For now, I just solved the problem by only showing the last 200 active users on the map.

The links to the profiles etc should still be developed further, but I would just like to get some feedback first before I put more time in this…

You can see it in live action here.

Enjoy,
Jeroen

Since I keep a huge list of paddling
related sites for Playak News Watch anyway, I thought I might as well
use that to create a 'Paddle Search Engine', which basically means
'Google in a paddling context'.

As an example, if you use this search engine to search for 'Agent' or 'Punk Rocker', you wont be bored by news about the CIA, the Ramones etc.

Feel free to try it out here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012365686223057051577%3Ar-xj5yyxtmq

Feedback welcome as always. If people like it, I may integrate it in Playak some day.

Enjoy,
Jeroen